Economie politique internationale

 

 

 


 

NEOLIBERAL CONSTITUTIONAL COUP IN EUROPE

A people's friendly and constructive Marxist critique

 

Table of contents

Introduction: Why Everyone should read Part III of the proposed European Constitution.

The main points in Part III: The true constitution of neoliberal Europe.

The irrational ''animal spirits of capitalism'' as the Supreme Masters of the European constitution.

Neoliberalism: ideology vs reality.

Why is Part III a scientific fraud?

The negative proof offered by Canada.

Conclusion: A return to Reason and to common constitutional sense.

Annex: Social surplus value and public sectors

 

 

Introduction: Why Everyone should read Part III of the proposed European Constitution.

 

Part III of the European constitutional Treaty to be signed in Rome on October 29, 2004 is, in effect, the real subterranean constitution mystifyingly proposed to the European people. It amounts to a neoliberal coup at the hand of right-wing and social-democratic forces. It constitutes an illegitimate and ill-conceived institutional power grab by the neoliberal bourgeoisie. It would amount to President Hoover trying to enshrine the economic and social principles of ''Hooverism'' as the major constitutional Amendment in the early 1933, just before his defeat by the New Dealers. European people and their representative political forces must not go along with this right-wing regression to a pre-modern, pre-Welfare state. Part III should be eliminated or be strictly subordinated to the recurrent democratic definition of social objectives by the citizens themselves. At a minimum, this constitutional treaty must be submitted to a national referendum in each member State of the UE. (The text of the treaty is easily available in the various national languages of the Union at the EU portal at http://europa.eu.int ). Since the present formulation urgently needs to be amended, it is a pleasant relief to see that the new Party of the European Left has denounced this Constitutional treaty as a ''codification of the market'' (1)

 

Any student of federal systems knows that a Constitution does not speak in vain. Especially if its amending formula is rigid. Its articles represent the supreme law of the land, the very principles which guide the day-to-day legislative, judicial and democratic processes. This implies that a good constitutional text cannot confuse its functions with that of a mere political manifesto. A good constitution might not necessarily be for all times but it needs to be for everyone. The present constitutional text would largely be acceptable in so far as it corresponds to the tradition privileging a natural evolution toward a greater European integration respectful of the prerogatives of each member States. Its Preamble also corresponds to the secular, tolerant and multidimensional heritage of Europe. One might perhaps have wished for a greater distinction between the tasks assigned to the Euro Zone and those imparted to the EU as such in order to avoid possible blackmails from non-Euro members, for example on inflation or on social policies. Similarly, one might have wished for the addition of a clearly formulated ''opting out'' provision so as to smooth the working of the subsidiarity principle without impeding the economic, social, political and diplomatic advances desired by some countries but not by all the members of the Union. Other critiques might be adduced. Nevertheless, as it stands, the Constitutional treaty does allow for an evolution of the power sharing arrangements and does so by reinforcing the potential role and legitimacy of the European Parliament. And yet, this impressive constitutional architecture crumbles because Part III and because of the spirit of Part III which, in the end, pervades the whole text. This inimical inspiration can easily be detected in nonsensical concepts such as ''social market economy'' or the fraudulent concept of ''fundamental freedom'' used as a heading intended to institute the constitutional sacredness of capitalist competition and freedom of movement for globalized capital. The proposed constitutional treaty exhibits a strong  streak since it shamelessly imposes the historically dated pretensions of neoliberalism as an eternal and revealed truth. The ideologically defined part is thus confused with the whole in a strange and ominous Nietzschean ''holism''.(2)

 

This foul and partial spirit of unfettered capitalism, which overshadows the entire constitutional treaty, amounts to a constitutional coup. It irreversibly opens the door to a socio-economic regression and to a scientific fraud. It inaugurates a constitutional future fraught with incessant crisis. It is therefore unworthy of an European constitutional treaty. In the most simple and straightforward terms, we will now attempt to show why it is so. (Anyone interested can and should consult the original text at the aforementioned site).

 

The main points in Part III: The true constitution of neoliberal Europe.

 

Here are the crucial articles which constitute the real core of this proposed neoliberal constitution. (They can easily be consulted in the original text at http://europa.eu.int ) A few personal comments are appended and a full analysis of their impact is proposed in the next chapter.

 

Part I. Article I-3

1)The Union's aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples.

2)The Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without frontiers, andan internal market where competition is free and undistorted.

The Union shall work for sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and with a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.(emphasis mine)

 

As can be seen, the text is the result of many hands. But what is important here is to note the weight afforded to the ''invisible(but nevertheless omnipresent) hand''  enshrined as the fundamental guiding principle. To repeat, neither Rawls nor von Hayek nor Milton Friedman or any other has been demonstrated to offer a valid theory of economics and political economy. Quite the contrary. Their ideological biases turned them into official eccentrics in the eyes of the once dominating bourgeois Classical and Keynesian economists. Full-employment is an afterthought. One which the OECD officially readjusted at 6 or 8 % at the beginning of the Volcker/Reagan/Thatchermonetarist counter-revolution from the frictional and seasonal 2 or 3 % of the earlier Keynesians, at least those who had followed more that one seminar of the famed English theoretician! A few years after, but before the idea was dispelled in practice by Prime Minister Jospin and his gauche plurielle 35 hoursprogram, some people were reduce to rephrase the largely fake question of structural unemploymentas a structural threshold impossible to break due to its downwards incompatibility with the ''market'' (the ''global market'' then was still conceived as foreign constraints, as you may remember).

 

Price stability requires a short comment. I personally think that Maastricht criteria are wise and needed to coordinate the otherwise headless economies which are or will become part of the Euro Zone. An economic planning body of the Union is nevertheless urgently needed ( see Europe des Nations, Europe sociale et pacte de stabilit9in the Political Economy section of my site http://lacommune1871.tripod.com .) The adjunct of Social criteria on the par with Maastricht economic thresholds would induce a more rational regulation of the European Economies compatible with more egalitarian redistribution. Others tools such as the national adaptation of Cooke ratios could be used to increase the efficiency and fairness of the central ECB main rates of interest. The remaining troublesome problem lies with the sloppy Modigliani's notion of the adequate rate of inflation as consciously practiced by the Bank of England on behalf of its City's patrons, a formula recently emulated by Greenspan.   Assuming that the disoriented and enfeebled unions of these capitalist homelands have forgotten all about their own Chain Fisher and its impact on real wages, Europe still need to deal with the impact of a deleterious practice it choses to forgo. Namely what are the Union's instruments that can be used to counter the effects of a non-benign, low but creeping rate of inflation resulting from imports in provenance from main commercial partners located outside the Euro Zone? Current anti-dumping rules could be invoked but seem rather cumbersome unless specifically formulated by the WTO and given a fast-track status. Present day monetarists have gloriously shown in practice how inflation could be lowered asymptotically to zero on the back of the proletariat, in other word despite the rising unemployment and poverty. It suffices to lower social benefits proportionally. The demonstration did in fact stand both in Chicago Boys' Chili as well as in Friedman's and Laffer's America! In a similar fashion Christopher Colombus reached the soon to be depleted Hispaniola Island on the basis of a fake sea journal held publicly for the purpose of mystifying his angry crews, while keeping his own mystified records for its own personal use, a behaviour common to so-called awakened mindsalways singularly sure of their own inspiration!        

 

Note that this Article lists among the Union's objectives a highlycompetitive ''social market economy''. But it does not define what such a dichotomous social market economycould be. A pity, since the only observable exemplars of the beastare to be found in the ex-East Bloc economies (and, increasingly, in China). These are Social Formations that are raped by a gang of oligarchs and 5th column expropriators who single-handedly caused their ruin and economic regression, a national fate which expectedly is quite compatible with the exhibitionist display of wealth by the privileged 10 % of the population comprised mainly by ex-apparatchicks robbers and repatriated expatriated, long nurtured in the cradle of Radio Free Europe and the intelligence, academic and cultural instances nourish by it and its masters. Jeffrey Sachs has since learned to erase his footprints for obvious legal reasons but they, on the other hand, continue their social and national destructive missions unabashed and even pretend to bring their methods in the very heart of the European constitution! This is a meritocratic bunch, indeed, which uses European structural funds to recreate an inegalitarian economic system akin to a voluntary servitude which might very well pull Western Europe as a whole in its suicidal wake. The spiritual sons and daughters of Brzezinski and Wojtyla, the CIA founded ex-opponents, fancy themselves to represent New Europe but would have to blush if they were asked to judicially and morally answer for the fate of a Dubcheck or a Kuron, among others.

 

 

1.The free movement of persons, services, goods and capital, and freedom of establishment shall be guaranteed within and by the Union, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution.

2.In the field of the application of the Constitution, and without prejudice to any of its specific provisions, any discrimination on grounds of nationality shall be prohibited.(emphasis mine)

 

This must be the most absurd of constitutional jokes. It is stated without a minimum distanciation thus proving its pathetic ideological slant. In other words, these so-called fundamental freedomsonly have an absolute value for capital, goods and services and for the freedom of establishment according to Part III. Free movement of persons will be absolute but only as far as capital requires it (which is better than Nafta) and will remain subject to national norms and regulations in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. This bias for capital necessarily applies to fair and free tradeas specified elsewhere by the Constitution. All other freedoms are therefore relative and subordinated to Part III. At a time when habeas corpus is revisited in its native Land by Labour's bastardsons and daughters of Thatcher (rather than Keynes) in favour of a useless philo-Semite Nietzschean doctrine of security and preventive war, the gist of it is granted as a monopoly to globalized capital, which plays the part of the Chosen cast in this sad, exclsusivist attack on all citizens. If the AMI was a tragedy dispelled in extremis by the gauche plurielle (despite M. Jack Lang studied sleepiness), this surely is a tragic joke, or more exactly a studied Nietzschean ''prank'') . Meanwhile, the US is using its Homeland security as a trade weapon, forcing all its trading partners to abide by its calculated and restrictive rules (such as maritime and air ports screening at specified points). Will Europe have to follow suit in order to protect itself thus sacrificing its civil liberties on the altar of an imperial trade regime? The constitutional strengthening of Social objectives, translated perhaps in a new anti-dumping rule taking sectoral and overall Keynesian full employment into account, would certainly constitute a more elegant manner to reach socially beneficial trading objectives. Why in the world would we need the Enlarged Union as the greatest consumer market otherwise?

 

 

Part III. Section I . Economic policy. Article III-70 (ex Article 98 TEC)

Member States shall conduct their economic policies in order to contribute to the achievement of the Union's objectives, as defined in Article 1-3, and in the context of the broad guidelines referred to in Article III-71(2). The Member States and the Union shall act in accordance with the principle of an open market economy with free competition, favoring an efficient allocation of resources, and in compliance with the principles set out in Article III-69.(emphasis mine)

 

This article speaks plainly. Is there any more doubt about the absolute domination of reversed science (in effect, Economic Nietzscheism) as the main purely ideological and cast-like criteria of interpretation of this unlikely constitution?

 

Part III-55 (ex Article 86 TEC)

1) In the case of  and undertakings to which Member States grant special exclusive rights, Member States shall neither enact nor maintain in force any provision contrary to the provisions of the Constitution, in particular Article 1-4 (2) and Articles III-50 and III-58.

 

2) Undertakings entrusted with the operation of  particular to the rules on competition, insofar as the application of such rules does not obstruct the performance, in law or in fact, of the particular tasks assigned to them. The development of trade must not be affected to such an extent as would be contrary to the Union's interests.

 

3) The Commission shall ensure the application of this Article and shall, where necessary, adopt appropriate regulations or decisions.(emphasis mine. For Article 1-4 see above.)

 

Please see Annex below for a rapid discussion of the notions of productivityand social surplus valueas they relate to ''public enterprisesand to Public Health and culture in particular.

 

 

The irrational ''animal spirits of capitalism''

as

the Supreme Masters of the European constitution.

 

The Constitutional Treaty specifies a great number of worthy and urgent social and diplomatic objectives. It does so with an apparent generosity. On closer examination, one realizes that these objectives are all strictly subordinated to the  ludicrous, a-historical and  ideologically defined ''fundamental freedoms'' lavished upon the historically bounded principles of capitalist competition and global mobility of capital. Necessarily then, public services (and more importantly, public enterprises) can only be derogatory to these ideologically defined ''fundamental freedoms'' (see Article I-4 paragraph 2 and Article III-55, above). Similarly all social and political rights take second place. They are strictly constrained by a constitutional obligation to remain compatible with the privileges afforded to capital, even when they already have been defined restrictively in carefully worded texts such as the ''Social Charters adopted by the Union'' (As we all know, these Charters fall far short of most unions demands and popular desire. Sometime they even fail to meet the national standards prevalent within some member States in the same fields.) In fact, even the agricultural sector is submitted to the same neoliberal economic catechism, albeit this is done with the usual prudent reservations. Given the electoral weight of the rural population in most European Higher Chambers, these are mainly devised to manage a smooth transition to the complete dominance of a productivist agriculture flanked by a purely residual, ecologically oriented local production, relatively free of genetically modified organisms. All constitutional processes are thus overdetermined by this neoliberal catechism enshrined as the core of the constitution. No useful, socially adaptive precedent could ever be created in such a constrained context. Nor could any jurisprudence ever be developed in favor of the effective strengthening of the very same objectives declared by the Constitution itself, if these developments happen to be  minimally opposed by asingle capitalist firm in the name of these so-called ''fundamental freedoms'' of capital. This will remain true whatever jurisprudence has been set in some member States before the eventual signing of this constitution. The Member States and the Union's democratic instances would thus relinquish their regalian regulation powers. These would, in fact, be strictly subordinated to the most opportunist conception of ''competition'' conjoncturally dictated by the dominant fractions of global capitalism. (In my comprehension of the matter, this capitalist privilege is now extended to non-European firms as well, since the mobility of capital is not otherwise specified to rule it out, and is clearly intended to be compatible with global mobility. This is, in fact, identical to what happened under Nafta but in a generalized fashion! It amounts to nothing less than the global victory that the neoliberal forces tried to impose with the MAI/AMI, leaving national governments and the European institutions themselves open to legal suits by domestic and foreign firms). The privilege of citizens to shape their own socio-economic and political regimes through democratic means will be permanently lost. In the end, what this simply means is that the effective interpretation of  this Constitution will be dictated by  the censitarian (3a) multinational organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or the OECD. These undemocratic global instances, where roaming global capital dominates, will therefore decide, at any one time, what ''competition'' means in theory and in practice. This is a constitution for the Business Councils of the EU but certainly not for the people of the UE member Nations.

 

What is more, these ludicrous '' fundamental freedoms'' of unfettered capitalism embody the absurd extension of an obligation-free EU into the Euro Zone's economic and social framework or, if you prefer a metaphor, the extension of the old Northern free-trade area into the Common Market. Paradoxically, today, the remaining aspects of the Northern, Scandinavian Welfare State are at a greater risk than the surviving continental versions. This means that, whereas it remains perfectly understandable for these countries to resist their incorporation within the Maastricht setting without the prior adoption of urgently needed Social Criteria, their approval of Part III of the proposed treaty would simply amount to a machination directed against their earlier popular and democratic conquests. Furthermore, the whole process would usher the unstoppable  establishment of a constitutional vassalage of all European nations to undemocratic supranational instances devised to serve the needs of compradore European bourgeoisies. This is the exact opposite of the initial European integration project.

 

The most neoliberal members of the EU might very well choose to oppose the enshrining of Social Criteria on the par with the overall Economic and Budgetary Criteria of Maastricht. Yet, they should not pretend to keep the Euro Zone hostage to their antiquated social theories and regressive practices. If a clear cut distinction between the two groups cannot be made at this time, then it becomes even more urgent to reestablish the primacy of the stated social objectives over the economic logic of capitalism, a reifying logic which can only substitute relationships among the people with relationship between things. Recalcitrant neoliberal members should then be allowed to use an opting outclause. This would satisfy their needs without killing the initial spirit and purposes of European integration which can be traced back to Mitrany and, more recently, to Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Jacques Delors, among others.

 

It should be noted that the fierce critique of Part III of the constitutional treaty by the Left and by the most coherent right-wing forces, in no way can weaken the original socio-economic and political project carried by the European integration movement in the hope of creating a coherent Regional Social Formation which could withstand the asymmetric competition of post-WW II America and thus neutralize the deleterious effects of the dollar supremacy thanks to the strengthening of the Euro (along with the Yen and, soon, the Yuan). Were the proposed constitution to be rejected, the Enlarged Union would still remain intact because of the Nice treaty. Part III imposes to the Euro Zone an homogenization in tune with the smallest common denominator as seen through the eyes of global capitalists. It therefore plans the deconstruction of the European socio-economic coherence gained through the Common Market (and its Social State models). It potentially reduces the proletariat to a pre-democratic stage antecedent to the 8 hours working day gained more than a Century ago and still written in the statutes of the ILO. Which ever way you look at it, Part III is demonstrably antithetical to the original European project born in the frontal fight against the Nazi-fascist version of Nietzscheism. You will recall that after the end of WW II, the Western European, and particularly the Scandinavian countries, needed to legitimize bourgeois democracy in opposition to the rapidly growing East Bloc and the strong attraction it exercised over the impoverished post-war European masses. The bourgeois elites of these countries were rapidly albeit reluctantly converted to the structural need to raise the welfare of their citizens. The widening of the scope of the Social State was therefore intricately wedded to the initial integration project.(4) The crumbling of the Iron Curtain should  have meant the further development of the European Social State, thanks notably to the ''peace dividends''. It certainly should never have led to the current delirious philo-Semite returnto the worst kind of Nietzscheism. Despite the miners and dockers valiant resistance, Thatcherism, with the help of the Gomperian and the City-friendly wings of Labour, the TUC and most of Fleet Street, has already produced a Tony Blair and his thirdish way team. Imagine what we can expect if the dogmas of Thatcherism spelled out in Part III are ever enshrined in the European constitution!

 

If I could write the constitution from scratch, I would include the principles exposed in my ''Europe des Nations, Europe sociale et pacte de stabilité'' notably with regard to the following elements: a) a double executive that would allow for the strengthening of a demographically based European Parliament without diminishing the exercise of national prerogatives through the European Council; b) a specifically European economic planning that would complement the crude economic coordination achieved at Maastricht; and c) an opting out formula which would allow the progression of the most advanced members of the EU without prejudice to the others, especially in the socio-economic and security domains. But we are not dealing with a blank page. At this point, constitutional matters cannot be written from scratch. We therefore need to be accurate and practical in defining what we want. One easy way out would be to add a certain number of Social Criteria to the purely economic Criteria of Maastricht. (5). However both should have a strictly equivalent constitutional force. This would leave the budgetary and fiscal constraints of Maastricht intact. The most fundamental economic coordination tasks vested with the Union would be preserved but, at the same time, the counterbalancing of economic objectives by social ones would imply a  more rational redistribution of wealth between labour and capital attained through purely democratic means. History being contemporary history according to bourgeois historism, this approach would mean that vague concepts such as competition and mobility of capital would have to be revised from time to time in order to meet social constitutional norm. True, it would be more elegant to avoid writing any particular economic doctrine in the constitutional text. However, this is a negotiated constitution with all its shortcomings, one that need the agreement of 25 sovereign countries which can already rely on the gains achieved with the Nice treaty. Avoiding the worse would already be a victory simply because being rational does not seem possible due to prevalent ideological biases and the prevalent constellation of forces, not the least among the Left. The constitutional necessity to meet specific social criteria would at least  instill a missing conceptual and practical sobriety upon neoliberal pundits and practitioners.

 

Such a solution would allow the Euro Zone to progress. In fact, it could very well be temporarily restricted to it until such a time when an opting out clause is agreed upon. The larger EU is already organized by the Nice treaty. The equilibrium established at Nice is not perfect and would quickly need to be substituted by a more rational option that would reinforce the European Parliament as, in fact, is attempted by the proposed constitutional treaty. Yet, the Left and all progressive forces need not rush into the proposed overall constitutional prison imagined by transversal neoliberal forces under the diktat of transitionally dominant Business Councils. Especially since the dominant fractions of capital are already faced with the announced economic and social failure of their cherished global capitalist model emphasizing a scandrelous (3b) version of private governance totally abstracted from any accountability toward the great majority of non-shareholders citizens and their democratically elected instances. A social strengthening of the Euro Zone does not adversely affect the future prospects of the enlarged EU. As far as new EU members are concerned it would, at most, imply a more rational allocation of the European structural funds mainly funded by the Euro Zone. Inversely, the social whitewashing of the proposed constitution of the enlarged EU has the potential to liquidate both the Euro Zone and the EU as an autonomous socio-economic regional bloc and to vassalize it to the United States and to its puny but hyper-agitated allies that easily fancy themselves to be either the advanced air-carrier or the very spiritual navel of the putative new Nietzschean Empire. This is not the time for compromising compromises on the Left!

 

Needless to say by establishing ''competition'' and ''mobility of capital'' as  ''fundamental freedoms'', the real fundamental freedoms of individuals, groups and society as a whole necessarily take a second place. Canada illustrates this point without ambiguity. The mobility of capital, in its formulation as  commercial freedom, was repeatedly used to strike down various aspects of Law 101. This poorly understood language law rapidly became the shadow of itself although both camps continued to instrumentalize it in their diametrically opposed nationalist propaganda . In reality, it merely tried to establish legal guidelines aimed at preserving French as a national language in Québec, an issue that was largely deemed to regard a cherished collective right in this province. Still, Trudeau's Canada Clausewould not have sufficed by itself to dismantle Law 101 despite its calculated effort to reimpose bilingualism mainly to Québec while all other provincial and federal instances concerned could easily escape the obligation. The so-called Canada Clausehad reinstated full official bilingualism for Québec and the federal level of government, and had extend official bilingualism to New Brunswick. At the same time, though, this Canada clausehad extended the scope of bilingualism well beyond the original governmental and judicial fields covered by the 1867 constitution, thus unleashing the slow but predictable assimilation of non-English speaking residents. Outside Québec and New Brunswick, the implementation of the Clause Canada could only be invoked when ''numbers justified it''. This pseudo demographic and economic rationality allowed to conveniently hide a pernicious economic logic made worse because of the North American context and the enormous pulling effect of the English language in this continental context.. This  asymmetric legal context, clearly calculated to let assimilation slowly take its toll, was toped off by the restrictions attached to commercial freedom which were mainly directed against the French language. (To understand the extent of the  slow and inexorable attrition of the French-speaking population in Canada as a whole one should read Jacques Lacoursière's préface to Gaston Miron}'s L'Homme rapaill9 ) Of course, French-Canadians self-termed ''Quebeckers'' are themselves the product of the same historical and officially dual constitution. (6) Their so-called Quiet Revolutionexhibits the characteristic pretension to merely substitute the dominated group (French-Canadians) to the dominant group (Canadians) as the sole interpreter of commercial freedomand other capitalist rules within their ownterritorial borders, without showing a much greater respect for the democratic implications of full citizenship and full integration and dignity of all the other groups. Their mentality remains congealed (Rae's terminology) withing an antiquated  Burkean tradition revisited by Durham and Sydenham, a colonial tradition which holds that government only need to provide the appearance but not the reality of democracy. Aside from Levesque himself, they all tend to copy the same colonial behavior so antithetical to the full rights and dignity ordinarily associated with the notion of citizenship and with the notion of full integration of landed immigrants. (Their attitude towards immigrant groups and towards Amerindian peoples display a distressful Fanonian tendency that, in the end, is counter-productive for their own collective aspirations.)

 

It is obvious that this regressive and ideological neoliberal trend undermines the growing global popular request for the establishment of social and collective rights at a par with known and widely accepted individual rights. It also sends society back to an obscurantist pre-Stuart Mill's conception of  liberty(7) and certainly light-years away from the conception formed by most thinkers of the Enlightenment, or even by a Thomas Paine or a Gerrard Winstanley. It only remains to find the right Bellarmin to publicly preach the new neoliberal theogony based on economic pre-Copernican knowledge when, in fact, his conscience and intellect demonstrate to him that it is fundamentally flawed! Part III is an insult to the Mind of Man.    

 

Neoliberalism: ideology vs reality.

 

It is deeply frightening to see that the highest diplomats and Heads of State in Europe have thought feasible to sell the neoliberal catechism of unfettered capitalism as the sole economic truth, at a time when this same ideological system is failing dramatically. Neoliberal recipes serve the interests of the ''65 000 MNEs, with around 850 000 foreign affiliates''(these up-to-date numbers are to be found in A fair competition: creating opportunities for all, ILO report, February 2004,  p 33). But it fails to do so while simultaneously serving the interest of the people involved. Aside for transitory new technological waves and eventual ''returns of techniques'', global capitalism always seeks the lowest labor costs. It now does so by forcefully opening up all the public sectors and regulations associated with the Welfare State to its voracious appetite, thus furthering the unfettered accumulation of capital for a few more years, in a vain effort to resolve the innate contradiction of capitalism which opposes chronic over-production to chronic underconsumption. In a new global version of the racial and ideological Apartheid Regime (8) of old, it now uses preventive wars on  foreign people in order to grab their natural resources and monopolize them for their own peculiar private purposes. In a dangerous imperialist trend foreseen by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, it now generalizes on the world scale the capitalist exploitation system based on social production for strictly private accumulation. It does so at the expenses of all other modes of production and all other epochal forms of State organization which do not correspond to its own. If unchecked, neoliberal fiscal policies will send the proletariat and associated classes in the throws of a new Nietzschean cast society bend on inventing and slowly establishing a new slavery and a new domesticity.

In North America, were neoliberal ''science'' was first adopted,  local governments and municipalities are already facing a state of crisis similar to that experienced in the 30s. The Orange county Reaganian episode was an harbinger of things to come. Presently, many American local governments are similarly close to bankruptcy. Some have to close their schools intermittently simply because they cannot afford to keep them open five days a week. Social inequality is increasing dramatically since the beginning of the 80's and proceeds at a higher pace with G. W. Bush's inequitable tax cuts that mostly benefits the richest 10 % of the population. Around 40 million people are not covered by either Medicare or Medicaid. Real unemployment rates are grossly underestimated in official rates designed to shed away discouraged job-seekers. Self-employment'' in non-viable small businesses is sold as the most creative way to create new jobs. In reality it only serves to hide effective unemployment within family or quasi family structures and is achieved at a greater overall expense than it would cost to fund a transparent and rational unemployment insurance policy mandated with the placement and the retraining of workers in a Keynesian full-employment context compatible with a viable industrial strategy. (It is commonly accepted that close to ¾ of all new small businesses do not survive past the first three years despite all sorts of governmental help which never seem to compensate for the reluctance of the lending banks.) Social security is still not adequately funded past 2008 and American workers will increasingly be pushed back to the old, per-modern, era of capitalism when they were allowed to receive their pension only 3 years before the average age of death. And this is all happening in a country which comprises about  7 % of the World population but still continues to squander more that 27 % of the World wealth.  

 

Distressingly, Europe is blindly following suit with its ill-advised privatization, decentralization and devolutions policies. Already, neoliberalism has demonstrated how easily it could swallow up huge tax cuts in the hope of furthering economic growth as a result of the trickle-down effect expected from this huge squandering. In John Galbraith's dismissive words, this amounts to feeding the horses in the hope of feeding the birds. Even though, this peculiar ''growth'' is increasingly restricted to fallacious GDP numbers. Only residually does it concerns the creation of jobs.  In turn, these chronic jobless neoliberal recoveries will destroy the taxation bases and hence the interventionist capacity of the State. Contrary to widespread wisdom, budgetary equilibrium and fiscal responsibility are not necessarily coterminous with the neocons' flat taxcredo and its associated but poorly publicized social cuts policies. These laudable objectives can very well be achieved through the strengthening of the Welfare State by means of a more equitable division of wealth between labor and capital thus allowing for the structural mediation of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which pits a chronic overproduction of good and services against a chronic underconsumption by the impoverished masses.(9)  A coherent social demand policyand a generalized reduction of the work-week for the same wage (the so-called 35 hours) are proven to have a positive effect on job creation, reduction of poverty and the simultaneous growth of the fiscal base. The present fiscal failure of the capitalist State, consciously engineered by the neoliberals, will continue to be used to discredit the Keynesian and post-Keynesian Social State. Social misery and its Nietzschean remedies will be sold  as unbreakable laws of nature just as the main theorems of mainstream monetarism.

This will be done in the hope of rehabilitating a rugged, red-neck sort of individualism compatible with the absolute dominance of private economic interests that will then be backed by one, and only one, pre-Smithian imperial State and its favorite ideological-religious temples quietly churning their continuous flows of authorized communications. Already the rules used to tally the official number of unemployed workers are drafted in such a fashion that they grossly underestimate the real number of persons officially concerned. A ''workfare'' program calculated to make people feel guilty, going hand in hand with the fake meritocracy of scandrelous, redundant and overpaid CEOs and CFOs,  further contributes to the artificial lowering of the official tally. Some persons prefer to relinquish their rights rather than face this organized humiliation intent on manufacturing cheap and servile labour. Still the resultant numbers do not include so-called ''immersed labour''(''travail au noir'') . This last phenomena is never marginal, not even in countries which can claim the most modern and efficient bureaucracies of all capitalist States, such as France or Germany. It is estimated at around 27 % of GDP in countries like Italy. These irrational percentages are destined to grow as the neoliberal, deregulated State tries to legitimate the destructive effect of unfettered global capitalism on job creation by fiscally encouraging the creation of part-time and temporary work. It will increasingly attempt to do so within small and tiny family businesses which can easily inflate the number of ''self-employed'' jobs, though this will hardly contribute to the slowing down of the general pauperization of an growing portion of the population.

On closer examination, the so-called American, British and Netherlands ' ''job-creation machines'' would quickly appear as statistical and political frauds if the statistical criteria used to evaluate them were made objective and were harmonized across comparable countries. For instance, the PNUD human development indexhints to a different story. In this respect, Mexico, even more than Canada, truly represents the neoliberal future of the United States'  socio-economic regime. Conversely, on the PNUD scale, despite the embargo, Cuba still demonstrates brilliantly how an alternative world is concretely possible. Yet it is the undiluted neoliberal paradigm which neoliberal Europe strives to belatedly mimic. In the end, such regimes can only survive by exploiting other nations and by convincing their own elite, including their Gomperian union elite, to go along with a raw neo-imperialism. As can be adduced from neoliberal European, a misleading Universal Light is self-servingly derived from the shaky and besieged  torch of the transplanted Statue, conveniently forgetting in the process that Liberty is but one element of the republican trilogy. Instead of working toward a society of shared work and plenty, scarcity is consciously engineered by possessing classes who prefer to exchange democracy and fundamental freedoms for the egoistic defense of their own privileges and illusory security. Nietzschean philo-Semitism has already failed as the putative new catechism of global deferencetoward the new ''masters''  by the new slaves. But this failure, by itself, represents a great danger since it is far from being recognized as such by all the failed ''chosen'' new warriors borne by this poor Earth. Unless democracy prevails, they can be expected to fight to the death to impose the survival of their cast privileges. Once againas Nietzsche likes to say.

 

Indeed, we went through this before. For years, we already had to endure the consequences of the social-democratic betrayal of the working people ... but at least we did this with a strong Left and the backing of a solid Bolshevik camp. In extremis this socio-political grounding among the world proletariat allowed us to forge a long-awaited anti-fascist alliance. This camp has now to be rebuilt almost from scratch given the miserable current ideologically biased, anachronistic and petit-bourgeois interpretations of the communist and socialist heritage by a small group of infiltrated people. As recent history shows, the opportunists in our own ranks excel by their instinct to detect the dominant winds but without ever risking to hazard a single constructive critique when such open insider critique is necessary to preserve the essence of the struggle of the Left. They always lavished their critiqueswhen safely outside the Party. Many of those who stayed put or who now take solace in their mid-ninety rehabilitation can easily be shown to desire nothing more than the burial of the communist method of investigation and its political program concerning the socialization of the means of production (which are not to be confused with personal legitimate private possessions). With the objective help of the 5th Russian column and the parasitic Jeffrey Sachs, a bunch of criminal expropriators who truly deserves to taste the capitalist gulag of minimum wages, unemployment and evanescent social services, they actively lent their legitimating help to the neoliberal, philo-Semite Nietzschean ideological cleansing conducted by Nato in the Balkans. They where still at it in the Russian Caucasus region when they where finally told to withdraw in their holes. The most nasty among them now argue in favor of an inexistent, or more precisely a defunct, Swedish, Scandinavian or German Welfare paradigm (despite the well-known Agenda 2010 and similar regressive programs) and for this reason staunchly insist on remaining inside the Party structures and communication organs where they exert a damaging and criminal censorship against authentic Marxist productions.

If these people still desire an alternative to communism after their known contributions to the discrediting of the Marxist labour law of value and its theoretical and programmatic consequences, including those exhibited by the precious though very partial Soviet experiment, they should unceremoniously be told to bring their many talents elsewhere. In fact, to bring them to the post-communist center-left disoriented parties which they themselves helped to legitimate some years ago with very obvious and verifiable results! Our communist heritage, which concretely demonstrate the possibility of an alternative world, remains our first line of defense as long as it is assessed without anachronisms with a clear and critical conscience.

 

This is not the time for lack of scientific rigor and basic honesty within the authentic Left, simply because the struggles, that have reopened against the same old Nietzschean fascistic returns, are as dangerous for the working classes and lethal for sovereign Nations as was the case after 1922. The chocking philo-Semitic gloss attached to it is but a transitory and rather distressing development, but it will not last, as any student of history and social ideas might surmise. Whatever one thinks of the past, the issue is not Stalinism (including Trotskysm) (10), an early authentically communist experiment that still needs to be objectively evaluated within the context of the ferocious capitalist and fascist aggressions and encirclement. In effect, the post-Stalinist economic liberalization operated by Khrutchev and Liberman in the context of a bureaucratic, non longer Bolshevik, command and controlled planning is often confused with Stalinism proper and deserves the masses' opprobrium to a much greater extend: they, not Stalin, killed the endogenous dynamic of the socialist mode of production. Yet Liberman, like Beria, is easily absolved on the back of a purely fabricated  mythology of Stalinportrayed as a new and more ruthless communist Ivan the Terrible, the dreadful Kobaof lagging petit-bourgeois and anointed icons worshipers who now think to be in tune with the New Times because they can freely use their hats! (check the article on « marginalist socialism » in this same section.)

 

Whatever the case may be, the main issue for the Left still is ''nationalization'' of all strategic sectors (perhaps through Workers' Funds controlled by the workers themselves) and a more equitable redistribution of social wealth through a planned, largely public economy. In even more precise terms, the issue for the Left is the collective and democratic control of ''social surplus value. Economic planning, albeit in a participatory mode, has to be rehabilitated if we ever hope to escape the Orwellian social engineering planned in all details by the huge private bureaucracies tied to global corporations. Their brand of ''social engineering'', once thought to be the appanage of hated ''totalitarianism'', is now shamelessly sold as , a post-Popperian, post-Vienna Circle fancy and vacuous concept that brings the positivist ''open society'' to the globalized age despite the obvious contradictions between theory and practice. This new governance portends to be the  of privatized decision-making. It is supposed to take over the regulating and redistributive functions exercised by Nation States and by the Interstates and multilateral organizations associated with them within the existing framework provided by the UN System and the UN Charter. This framework itself is to be replaced by a new imperial world order at the service of big multinational corporations and banks.

 

An urgent question to be examined by everyone on the Left is whether there can exist any socialist theory that would legitimate itself by a pointed (and ridiculous) rejection of the Marxist labor law of value. Can there be an European socialist version which would for ever renege on Jaurès' conviction concerning the ultimate fate of the most important Means of production in the Constitution text itself, because of its failure to conceive an adequate ''revolutionary reformist road to socialism'' (11) that could complement Lenin's ''revolutionary road'' still useful in different circumstances? Merely asking these questions should amount to answering them. At least, it should trigger some careful objective thinking from all persons involved independently of the sociological ''position'' occupied. The people on the Left who lavish calculated and apparently sober praises upon the proposed constitutional treaty should tell us what a socialist (let alone a communist) electoral program would look like after the ''unanimous'' signing of this ''constitution''. The various State Councils and Supreme Courts are already badly skewed toward the needs of Business Councils. The EU Antitrust body, perhaps mesmerized by the Iron lady's biography, has shown its suicidal activism as if its ''reversed Schumpeterism'' (12) could ever usher back a classical period when the corner shops of the butchers, backers and tailors of old could (pace Braudel!) recreate a Smithian era gloriously basking in the aura of ''perfect competition'', presumably under the beloved ''cherry tree''... while singing the praises of the proverbial apple pie! Just imagine their role when their phalanges will finally be backed by Part III! The Left might desire the conquest of the ''presidency'' or the ''premiership''in order to further its egalitarian socioeconomic goals and to establish European independence in all domains. But one would presume that it would do so in the hope of avoiding being told to keep its own place, say in Lisboa  or over the Balkans. It would do so in the hope to be institutionally able to help set new socially-progressive constitutional parameters for Europe as a whole, in addition to setting them for one's own Nation.

 

Why is Part III a scientific fraud?    

 

Why is it a scientific fraud? It should by now be clear that neoliberalism as a practical regime is a demonstrated failure and will increasingly show its shortcomings. However, the class origin of the leading negotiators of the constitutional treaty might explain at least part of their blindness. What is not so easily explained away is their forceful and duplicitous parti pris. You will remember that the publication of the infamous Part III was first delayed in an attempt to keep the initial, and therefore passionate debate, squarely on the more prosaic aspects of the constitution text. (12) Indeed, at the time, one might even have candidly thought that a strictly transitory, non-constitutionalized, Part III would have been necessary in order to manage the smooth integration of the new members inside the institutions and processes of the enlarged EU and, ultimately, of the Euro Zone. A very different negotiating trend started immediately after the Nice Accord. In effect, as it stands today, Part III has become the true and effective constitution within the proposed text! It supersedes everything else. And it fraudulently establishes the supremacy of bourgeois economic lawsabove social needs and social processes. A rather surprising result since it can be deemed unworthy of the humanist culture of the main negotiators. In their neoliberal euphoria, they collectively acted like the famous beggar who searched for its lost hat under the lone lamp-post since it was the only place in town where he could see properly! As for the proletariat, it presumably will have to wait for Godot. Once again.

 

Because these negotiators cannot be presumed to ignore the basics in both economics and political economy, we are forced to concluded that they have knowingly engineered a constitutional neoliberal coup. They must be asked to return to their drafting board. For the good of Europe, the constitutional text urgently needs to be amended before it is approved either by the governments involved or more adequately by referendum. Or else, the proletariat and their authentic organizations will have voluntarily participated in cutting the grass under their own feet. Their only remaining choice would then be the ''Third Way'' (14) cooked up by the likes of Blair and Giddens, thanks to their sense of truth, their understanding of human rights and their comprehension of objective socio-economic data. This Third Way will necessarily evolve to become as straightforward and useful as is characteristic of the present host of 10 Downing Street!

 

At the beginning of the Twenty-first century who can still ignore that the economic lawsof capital expounded by bourgeois economics are theoretically shaky and rest their case mainly on the myth of ''competition''? (the vague concept of competition works as a tautological concept which is itself interpreted in many different capitalist variations from Smith to Ricardo to Walras, to Samuelson, and to Chamberlain, Robinson and Sraffa, among others. Just ask yourself whether supply and demand, in Marshall's geometrical schemes or in their algebraic versions,  is exactly the same as competitionseen as unfettered Darwinian mobility of capital. Ask yourself what is implied if you think of both as complementary. What is meant by specific and general equilibrium under these conditions?)

As far as I know, economists might differ on many respects but all bourgeois economists agree on one single methodological principle. Namely the fact that economic laws and equations can perhaps illuminate the necessary relationships and expected consequences of a given set of variables, but in no way can they miraculously offer the quantitative magnitude and qualitative nature of these initial variables on their own terms. Nor can they foresee in strictly economic terms the possible changes which might affect the initial variables considered, or change the social and institutional setting in which they express themselves (a lesson learned the hard way in the mid-90s by the speculative economists cum mathematicians who blindly followed Derman, Black and Scholes and few others.) For this, economists need to refer to social, political and even to psychological reality. Leon Walras stated this very clearly. Schumpeter took the principle as his own and even tried pathetically to turn it into a methodological (positivist) truth to be opposed to the organic conception of political economy defended by the Marxists. To preclude discussion he affirmed that the disticttion between micro and macro-economics was an « ontological dichotomy» ! In a sense, Rawls is forced to follow the same route since, in the end, he is forced to submit his simplistic gamesprivileging ''cooperation'' to an extraneous logic, that of ''social justice'' offered on purely ethical (un-demonstrated and exogenous) grounds necessary for the intellectual coherence of his system, if not for its political legitimation. In the context of the constitution we should therefore ask: What can ever come from a conscious deviation from the most basic scientific principle of the bourgeois economic intelligentsia itself? I have already answer that question earlier when I mentioned the impossibility, under such fallacious axioms and conditions, to ever be able to create the necessary jurisprudence necessary for the  social stability of the system. This putative constitution is, in effect, a cage. And what is more, a locked cage for the people and their authentically progressive parties.

 

Despite the phraseology what is offered is the exact antithesis of the Social Europe which all people in the  enlarged Union, and outside it, ardently wish for. Unless Part III is struck out of the constitutional treaty as such, or a restricted set of specific Social criteria be added on the par with the Maastricht criteria in the constitution itself,  it is hard to see how any person on the Left might be able to accept such a crooked deal. (Some persons on the ''left'' and within European unions, in fact, did praise the text. Others offered lip-service criticisms as a way to better make their rank-and-file members swallow the bitter pill. But, interestingly, they did so without mentioning Part III and even less the total subordination of everything else in the constitution to the supremacy of capitalist competition and the mobility of globalized capital.

While hoping not to be unnecessarily generous, my suspicion is that they  wrongly see this treaty from their own narrow and shortsighted national perspective: in other words this treaty is seen as a necessary step forward just like Maastricht. (15) The problem is that, even though it remains a treaty negotiated between governments, this is no Maastricht. With its restrictive amending formula, it is to become the overall constitution of the enlarged European Union, including the Euro Zone. An ordinary law can be changed by Parliament. Even a treaty is not as binding as a constitution because under certain circumstances it can be modified or undone by diplomacy. A constitution is all together a different matter. For a long time to come, it will define the very nature of all democratic processes in the Union, be they executive, legislative, judiciary or be they related to domestic and foreign security, that is to say to the recognized scope and depth of civil liberties enjoyed by sovereign European citizens. Subsidiarity and the conception of the EU as the Europe of Nationsderived from the traditional integration theory, as opposed to a strictly ''federal'' construct, will themselves be subordinated to the most nefarious and historically dated principles of neoliberalism. Moreover, these damaging constitutional principles will be enshrined in a text which will remain notoriously hard to amend! In short, these persons are offering a partial and fallacious, even suicidal, view of what is at stake. We all agree that European integration urgently needs to be pushed forward at this specific historical juncture. The proposed constitutional text does not do that. It merely adapts Europe to the needs of globalized capital while preventively closing any constitutional avenues for the proletariat, both in blue or white collar, and for the Left, to play their own democratic part, if only as legitimate socio-economic counterweights. It is doubly condemnable since this text remains the  result of an intergovernmental process more than that of a truly European democratic endeavour embodied in a genuine constituent assembly.  

 

At a minimum, then such incomprehensible and unworthy expressions as ''social market economy'' have to be taken out of the constitution text all together. Furthermore, if Part III is not purely and simply struck out of the final constitutional text per se, it should start with a simple but dignified statement subordinating everything in Part  III and in the constitution as a whole to the recurrent political, hence democratic, determination of the levels to be achieved by the social and economic objectives already enshrined in the constitutional treaty. For instance this democratic principle concerns closely the operation of public enterprises and their national or European long-term price structureswhich need to be democratically agreed upon. The constitution should, therefore, clearly recognize that public enterprises offering public services are totally legitimate and cannot be conceived or interpreted as depending on ''an internal market where competition is free and undistorted'' (Article I-3). Simply speaking of public serviceswithout protecting public enterprises is only a tactical manoeuvre destined to break what are now considered public monopolies. Public enterprises and their price structures cannot be conceived as a derogation to an illusory and inexistent ''free competition'' but instead as the necessary embodiment of State regulation in an advanced capitalist economy still governed by democracy.

This democratic principle is the only one which could be accepted without prejudging of the citizens sovereign right to decide in permanence for themselves through their democratic institutions, including through their modified European Parliament. It should be established as the main interpreting rule for all similar questions in all other sections of the constitution. In a sense, this is what the proponent of the specific social criteria to be added to the famous Maastricht criteria try to achieve. In my view, because we are dealing here with a constitution and not an ordinary treaty, a lot will per force depend on ''interpretation rules''. If these social criteria were to be subjected to the neoliberal catechism as much as the social rights already are in the constitutional text and the additional Charters, the result would be meaningless. Indeed, it would be dangerously demoralizing for the proletariat and its associated classes and parties. The clarification of the main interpreting rule is what is urgently needed, at this stage. The rest can eventually be won incrementally by the Left through the pressure exercised by its national governments or by its European representation. If the keys are denied to the real owners, the citizens themselves, locked doors will necessary have to be forced open through all available means. As old Bolsheviks knew, a ''reformist revolutionary strategy'' is only valid when the democratic playing field is minimally fair.

 

It should be emphasized here that the authentic Left does not share Walras limited methodology. In fact, Marxists, among whom myself, walking in Marx's footsteps have scientifically established the organicity of economic and social facts and processes. This should not be confused with the inexact formulation given by some people to my critique to Keynesianism and other bourgeois economics. These theories can always establish an ''equilibrium'' once the number and nature of the variables are specified. Their macroeconomy is methodologically always post hoc facto. Strange as it may seem in retrospect, some people have concluded that labour should therefore be treated as an ''independent variable''. Which is a silly relapse into Walras. This regression affects post-Keynesianism as well as pseudo-Marxian thinkers such as Maurice Decaillot.(16) In fact, the scientific organicity is well expressed by the relationship between v (variable capital in the form of living labor  considered in the process of crystallizing itself into a new product) and C where C = c + v. That is to say, C  includes c (the constant used up capital as already crystallized, objectified labor) and v (the variable capital also in the form of crystallized labor since labor power alone can exhibit this dual characteristic of being autonomously and simultaneously composed of living and crystallized labor.) Obviously, Marxists, classical economists and humanists alike hold v, the labor power, to occupy a very special place as the sole autonomous creator of exchange value, be it material or intellectual. Moreover vstands for the whole proletariat. It represents the generic worker without having to be restricted to the ''industrial worker'' alone or to « simple labour » as Adam Smith would have it. As such, it collectively comprises the majority of citizens. In a democracy these citizens can hope to decide  some very important issues such as the redistribution of wealth between labor and capital and therefore, at least to some extent, the remuneration level of v, though it cannot do that arbitrarily without creating many contradictions and crisis. This relative autonomy is what Marx called the ''moral'', that is to say the civilisational aspect, reached be humanity. As proven by the current form of globalization, the capitalist international division of labour makes it very difficult to preserve and even more to raise this ''moral'' level in the confines of a single National or Regional Social Formation.

The modification of the ratio pv/v, which takes the historical form of the free labour contract in the capitalist mode of production, represents the primordial social Keynesianism advance from individual salary to individual plus differed salary. It opens the door for the collective control of surplus value in the form of ''social surplus value'', through ''revolutionary reformist'' means. Failing that, the old Bolshevik revolutionary route cannot be forgotten and should never be excluded as practical alternative. Once these fundamental relationships are correctly established, it becomes evident that Marxism is the unique economic theory of social and economic  which is demonstrably logical and coherent while remaining firmly based on reality (''concrete thought'', says Marx in his Method). I have already shown that Bohm-Bawerk's discovery of an alleged contradiction in Marx' Reproduction schema pertains uniquely to his own misunderstanding of Marx than to Marx himself. His ideologically motivated misconception was further complicated by the use of the non-Marxist schema of Tugan-Baranovski and above all that of Bortkiewics (Anticipating Popper's mutilating positivist  strategy, this last statistician, in effect, conveniently ''re-arranged'' Marx's equations, or rather those of Tugan-Baranovsky, so as to make them fit nicely into a quadratic equation form, that is to say an easily solvable form which unfortunately had nothing to do anymore with Marx's original problem, despite appearances. My contention then is that Bohm-Bawerk's critique - the falisfied ex ante/post hoc contradiction of the so-called « transformation problem » of value into price of production - is still pertinent but only applies to all forms of bourgeois general equilibrium theories (as was neatly illustrated by the debate between Samuelson's students and Joan Robinson over the so-called ''factors of production'', a problem which is singularly illuminated when the Marxist ratios, which I have reestablished in their scientific and communist purity, are taken into account.)  In Tous ensemble and in the chapter dealing with Cuban socialism to be found in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme, I have shown that unless the organic composition of capital is correctly understood as v/C, productivity (where the ratio pv/v, in other words surplus value over variable capital, necessarily moves in the inverse proportion of v/C, on the basis of v)  becomes incomprehensible and Marxism itself, the great theoretical achievement of the proletariat and humanity as a whole, is vulgarly debased to the level of a Bohm-Bawerk and to that of many theoreticians inferior to him but who temporarily followed in his footsteps with the iron certitude of awakened disciples! Only thus the labour law of value and Marx's Reproduction schemes become fully coherent and thus pertinent for socialism. Once this is understood, the meaning of ''social surplus value » becomes evident and one can hope to scientifically enlighten the logic of the advanced capitalist and the socialist regulation forms, that is to say the specific historical epochs, which depend on the rational and coherent choices that are made.

Please note that I have challenged and continue to challenge bourgeois and other economists to refute this theory (and the associated social theory of redistribution based on what I called ''social surplus value'' ) Yet, contrary to the ideological and unscientific negotiators of the constitutional treaty, I would not pretend that this organic conception of political economy be enshrined in the constitutional text, although it at least retains the Sweezian virtue of unambiguously showing where the value preempted by capital in the form of profit truly originates! But, as a citizen, I am entitled to ask that no other single economic ideology be enshrined in the supreme European text. Above all, I would ask that any economic and socio-economic principles stated in the constitution be carefully worded so as not to foreclose unavoidable future socio-economic processes dictated by reality itself. Indeed, a legitimate lawful State(Etat de droit')' rightly values the enshrining of individual and collective, social freedoms as ''fundamental rights of the citizens. They do so in order to partially abstract these civilizational conquests from the purely conjonctural threat inherent in what is known as the ''tyranny of the majority. It is unfortunate perhaps that these fundamental rights are still mainly formal or strictly limited by their overdetermination by vested interests. Indeed many bourgeois constitutions restrict fundamental rights to what is ''acceptable'' under bourgeois democracy, which amounts to the proto-Nietzschean institution of sophistical tautology as the prime line of defense of capitalist private interests! Historical and legal evolutions have taught us that these individual and collective or social fundamental rights clearly are at a different human and civilizational level than the concepts and practices which can be adduced from prevalent economic theories. True, their concrete realization depends on economic efficiency, specifically judged by the equity of wealth redistribution. However, if at the present stage of historic human development, efficiency cannot yet be entirely subordinated to citizens' rights, the reverse is surely anti-democratic in its essence. (see the Annex, below) Cultivated Nietzschean anti-scientific ignorance cannot substitute for economic and political scientifically derived wisdom, particularly not in the constitution. Who in Europe needs the incessant and debilitating constitutional confrontation which agitates multinational  ''federations'' strictly dominated by capitalism and private property, that is to say by the inherently skewed idea of  an ''accommodation'' restricted to the leading capitalist elites instead of being firmly grounded on a widely diffused power, democratically shared among all citizens and all nations involved?

 

The negative proof offered by Canada.

 

Canada is a typical instance of a skewed federation based on a multicultural reality and an artificial binational asymmetric power sharing dominated by a shortsighted capitalist and Burkean conception of the vertical mosaic.  

 

I have taught Canadian federalism for almost a decade. The consideration of the constitutional constraints impeding the emergence of the Canadian Welfare State within the context of its insertion in the post-World War II Capitalist World Economy was part of my doctoral research. These were studied as a mean to understand the logic of the structural reforms already launched by the Volcker/Reagan/Thatcher team in order to dismantle the Welfare State (17). (Shortly afterward these same neoliberal recipes were neatly summarized and adapted to the Canadian context by the Trilateral which inspired the Donald Macdonald Commission of 1984.) The inherent constitutional contradictions, their congenital inadequacy with an evolving reality have, so far, proved impossible to correct.

 

The Canadian constitution was formulated at a time when the State, and more particularly the State in the Westminster tradition, was though to be minimal and ''non-interventionist'' in the sense that it only intervened forcefully for the benefit of capital (witness the massive aid afforded to the building of the railroads, the Navy bills, the Imperial Tariffs and trade policies and the anti-combine laws directed against the possible association of workers in unions to insure the defense of their own interests, even in a moderate Chartist sense). The public purse rested mainly on some traditional tools such as levies on tobacco and alcohol, fines and imports duties. Modern public « fiscal theory » and its practices were not yet born as a scientific discipline. The constitution passed along this state of affair, taking it a an unshakable truth. It therefore conferred social policy and the then residual taxation power to the provinces, granting the most lucrative revenues of the time to the federal level. Capitalism then evolved under the joint impact of the emergence of the multinational corporation (see Hilferding, Lenin and later, in the early twenties, Berle and Means) and the birth of industrial unions (from the One Big Union to the CIO which shook up the Gomperian trade unions during the thirties and forties.) The Welfare State slowly came to be understood as the general remedy necessary to save capitalism from itself (from Bismark's and Roosevelt's  own Wagner to Beveridge, Wicksell, Myrdal, Keynes and the French Conseil National de la Resistance etc...) Yet, despite many reports, such as the Rowell-Sirois report, the Canadian State was never able to elegantly solve the original unscientific contradiction. In fact, it was able to adapt itself only by reinforcing the centralizing aspects of the constitution in the name of  the ''order and good government'' doctrine and by using its newly acquired spending power to invade the provinces precincts. Later this contradiction was aggravated by the province-building trend (in the West and in the Maritimes.) and by the nation-building efforts (in Québec) which essentially tried to regain the spending power lost earlier to the Federal.

The same unilateral and dogmatic approach creating the same kind of problems can be observed with the fake doctrine of bilingualism. It is fake because, in practice, it only applies to Québec, NB and the Federal level but only where ''numbers'' would justified it outside Québec (i.e. The fate of Manitoba article 23 clearly shows the cold-blooded results that federally supported assimilation trends can produce!) It should be noted that the alliance among all the elites opposing the American Revolution which was once established between the ''priests and lords infected province'' (Québec), and the Foreign Office paradoxically added a virtual peoples' accommodation to the Orangists' policy favoring subservient elite accommodation. (18) This led to the joint recognition of the Common Law and of the Civil Code which eventually found its way in the 1967 Constitution. As I have been the first to note, this first tentative to non-doctrinaire problem-solving is the only aspect which remains largely uncontroversial in Canadian federalism. (19) (To the point that it had disappeared from some people political understanding! Nevertheless, this represents the gist of the distinct society argument without the usual ideological manipulations, such as those exhibited by the pro-Trudeau Judy Rebick's strange and opportunistic conception of women's rights in the context of the constitutional negotiation of a distinct society status for Québec. Who on Earth can ever understand why a distinct Québec would have diminished the status of women's rights in the 1982 Canadian Charter, given that Québec's charter of rights is identical in most respects to the federal Charter, except for strictly federal matters, and was even legislated before the Canadian version? Unfortunately, as we know, most pressure groups in this country live on governmental funds ...)  

In fact, this non-doctrinaire settlement allowed for the legal constitutional harmonization of the Common law in all the provinces except Québec while permitting the cross-pollination of both judicial traditions  in my view, this cultural and judicial interaction organically as well as politically led to the sixties and seventies cry in favour of a charter of rights, a popular demand unilaterally manipulated in a pathetic doctrinaire fashion by Trudeau and his nominees such a Bora Laskin. This is because citizenship even in a strictly Jacobin republic has never meant the uniformization and centralization of all social and political decision-making processes but instead the guarantee of an equaltreatment for all citizens as equal human beings. The argument, which a simplistic but stubborn Trudeau and his groupies never seemed to grasp despite the concession contained in the restricted Article 15  and the principle of perequation included in their Charter, concerns the notion of  equality . This concept is at the core of citizenship and cannot decently be addressed without a proper understanding of Marx's early discovery and his definitive formulation in his critique of the Gotha Program which demonstrates that objective equality among citizens sometimes requires a differentiated legal and constitutional treatment in order to become effective, otherwise it only serves as a intolerable formal fig-leaf hiding crass and artificially maintained inequalities.(20)

As is known, Marxists and in particular, Lenin and Stalin in their analysis of the national question , have expanded on Marx's foresight. The USSR was a splendid illustration of this understanding as long as the socialist mode of production remained intact. The capitalist mode of production, driven by the laws of centralization and concentration of capital, is as antithetical to real democracy as it is to the multicultural aspects of any federation. Democracy needs sovereign citizens, it cannot flourish with permanent subjects. In the country of the Family Compact any decent modern democrat might have understood that the conjunction of concentrated capitalist power and purely mono-ethnic networks is a recipe for permanent crisis. The Quiet Revolution illustrated the point again as the Rebellion of the Patriots had done before. Though the good Jesuit Fathers bear no responsibility, Trudeau was congenitally incapable to understand this basic reality: many Canadians mesmerized by him are now doing worse but with the added good conscience provided by the successof Trudeau's constitutional coup de force. As you may recall, Diefenbacker had already introduced a Charter but it was not enshrined in the Constitution. In effect, the popular desire for a Charter correcting the censitarian aspects of the Westminster colonial tradition was fraudulently used as the legitimizing plank necessary to force a repatriation of  the Canadian constitution from London while imposing further constraints on Québec as well as on the other Canadian provinces. In effect, Trudeau's Charter was symbolically enshrined into the 1982 Constitution but only after its Article 1 had cut its wings in order to please the most conservative and anti-unions forces such as those represented by Manitoba Conservative Premier Sterling Lyon.  Similarly, Part III  of the European constitution treaty is a purely doctrinaire and ill-inspired section. It bodes very badly for the EU if it is kept (at least in its present form). A worthy constitutional text needs to set clear rules and objectives. But when the rules cannot be "unambiguous", its clarity and pertinence rests on its ability to formulate a flexible framework inside which the sovereign citizens of the Union will, from time to time, set their rules of the game without blindly and ideologically prejudging of the future or betraying the past.

 

Due to the ordinary conformism which pervades any society and in particular its established legal and constitutional instances, a misconceived and nonobjective constitutional text poorly attuned to real social and economical processes in a democratic setting is sure to create its own conceited and doctrinaire experts and public servants. As well as an intrusive ideological police. Trudeau was the epitome of this kind of perverse constitutional human artifact. Remodeling his nose or sporting a fresh flower in his lapel did not change either his education nor his political soul. As foreseen by some of the best old mandarins such as John Holmes, his contribution and that of his groupies did bode badly for the future of the country. In reality, Trudeau failed in each of his original pretensions and transformed the existing 1867 Canadian constitution into an even more contradictory and ill-adapted text. In all instances, he pathetically ended up doing the exact opposite of what he unconvincingly pretended to believe. Starting as a labour lawyer who had flirted with the socialist CCF,  he ended as an unlikely Pearsonian recruit well at ease with the most openly self-proclaimed Machiavellian personnel in the Government Party and Liberal bureaucracy such as Kirby and Micheal Pitfield. The original Trudeaumania promised some escape from puritan and backwater conformism, yet the intelligence services continued to prey in people's bedrooms and barns without proper mandate and the libertarian facade was ultimately shattered by the gross manipulations of the War Room and the imposition of the War Measure Act. In the end, his alleged bilingual activism was restricted to the federal level contrary to the original Pearsonian Victoria amending formulawhich would have extended official bilingualism to all the provinces where French had historically been present and not only Québec. Even though federal bilingualism never exceeded some 17 % of the public servants despite the fact that the French population, today in sharp decline, amounted to more than a fourth of the general population. This congenital reductionism was enshrined in his repatriated constitution thus rending an unstable context even worse. Trudeau, the alleged progressive, the closet liberal in the hurry, ended up trying to impose wages and price controls but without much conviction as far as prices were concerned thus naturally leading to his shameless proclamation of the Trilateral mantra about the necessity to put an end to the so-called Revolution of rising expectations(this was the Trilateral original version of the pseudo-ecologist ''décroissance'' theory now seriously (sic!) offered as a new Sorelian mythby Attac! See for instance Le Monde diplomatique of July 2004 and earlier issues (21)).

This eventually led to the Trilateral inspired Macdonald Report of 1984 which proposed the ''reform'' (read the dismantling) of the Canadian Welfare State, a project which was initiated by Trudeau and his cronies and neatly carried out later by Wilson and Mulroney, only to be continued by Chretien and Martin. In foreign policy, Trudeau had some pretensions too. First among these the desire to put an end to the colonial aspect  nested within the 1867 Constitution which made the Queen's Privy Council in London the ultimate constitutional arbiter. He succeeded in repatriating the constitution but only at the price of an enduring fracture of the federation. Even his Supreme court which replaces the Queen's Privy Council falls short of the earlier Victoria constitutional proposals and remains tainted since the federal maintains a monopoly over the nominating process of the nine judges sitting in it. In a characteristic Fanonian spontaneous gesture, Trudeau might well offer a pirouette'' for the cameras  of the Queen, yet he could not in any way, shape or form ever conceive any change to the Burkean status of the Crown nor, incidentally, to the nature of the Head of State of the country. A red-neck Orangist could not have hoped for more and this was well understood in Ontario as well as in Alberta. Trudeau was once described in a rather crude and prosaic language by Nixon for his apparent stance during the Vietnam War. Alas! once in power Trudeau quickly showed that he never had dreamed of putting an end to the production of the Agent Orange and of the anti-personnel mines imagined by the capitalist-minded American military but largely produced in Canada. Trudeau was the independently richson of the owner of a small gasoline chain, that was eventually sold to American interests just as were the automobile and all other major economic sectors. Naturally on the economic front too you would expect him to have a characteristic impact: before him Canadian nationalists could still hope to ''lament'' the loss of independence of their nation; after Trudeau and his congenital inability to arrive at an adequate accommodation of the peoples encompassed within the federation, including the badly instrumentalized First Nations, the road was wide open for total continental integration. This was offered in extremis as ''fair trade'' instead of ''free-trade'', but with an inherently identical content. Thus Canadians are now pushed into a situation were their domestic affairs are mostly determined in Washington and Colorado Spring for the sole benefit of a few neo-compradore capitalists who happen to have rode on Trudeau's coattails. These were unattached to the Canadian past history and national evolution and quickly moved their main, albeit still unofficial, Head Offices south of he 49th  Parallel after having previously adopted US accounting rules for all their internal operations and opportunistically hired US CEOs.

This was all done thanks to majority governments gained with some 40 to 43 % of the popular vote. The continuation of this trend means that this cast-oriented continental integration is achieved without a proportional citizens' say in the American Congress which, in effect, means taxation without representation. Canadians have now to do with a Embassy acting mainly as an economic lobby for the private interests of the new elite described by Peter Newman, as Gotlieb and others know very well. From colony to colony, then? Who would dare saying so in Canada, since the mantra learned from daycare is that this is the ''best country in the world'', that is, if you are not paid the minimum or even the average wage! Who else but Canadians would ever wholeheartedly be convinced that the Queen's Own Rifles went into the Sinai to create a glorious tradition of ''peacekeeping'' and not to serve the interests of the old British colonial masters who had lost face over their belated imperialist intervention in the Canal Zone, an odious military intervention directed against Abdul Gamal Nasser of Egypt and the Non-Aligned Movement, but an intervention which had nonetheless angered the new American imperial masters? The ''go-between'' concept had not been developed by chance in the youthful days of the sixties when Althusser's return to Marx served as a pitiless projector on mainstream conformism and its non-dits, even for those who preferred to hide behind A. Innis or Veblen political economy in order not to expose themselves too much politically.

It is usually said that one ignores the lessons of history at his/her own expense. However, the lack of objective conscience and the ingrained subservience and mediocrity of the dominant ''intelligentsia'' ensure the permanence of the debilitating trends. Yet, in the end, it should be obvious that Trudeau's doctrinaire centralization accomplished without the consent of all involved parties is unworkable, especially in the context of a neocon fiscal policy. At best, it can only mean the imposition of national normsbut without the corresponding transfer of federal funds, rending it impossible to honor them especially in a globalized ''free trade'' environment. Taxation room can be transfered to the provinces instead (and perhaps even to the municipalities in a belated imitation of the once bankrupt City of New York!), but this necessarily leads to a Balkanization of the country and a conservative (with a small c) alliance between all centrifugal political and economic forces in the West as well as Québec and the Maritime, as exemplified by the Allaire report. Soon, due to the delocalization and outsourcing trends, even Mr. Layton will find hard to talk about adequately funding municipal infrastructures: the Marshallian theory of trade and localization will again teach its pseudo-steady state logic associated with fierce local pro-business competition destined to attract short-term globally mobile investments! Likewise, Trudeau's dame patronnessestand toward the Third World probably derived from the Catholic Chinese stamps campaign conducted during his youth when Québec was itself in the stage autobiographically described by Pierre Vallière (see his Nègres blancs d'Amérique) and Roger Viau (see his Au milieu, la montagne). In the end, with characteristic predictability Trudeau's foreign aid philosophy was concertized by reneging on the promise to contribute 0.7 % of national GDP to foreign aid which in reality was drastically reduced and mainly offered as tied foreign aid. The real percentage was quickly reduced to around 0,3 % and one is entitled to ask, albeit without much conviction, whether the rhetoric was not intended to artificially create the possibility for Trudeau's nomination as General Secretary of the UN! Certainly the many persons, including within the Liberal Party which unceremoniously pushed him through the door after his contribution to the efforts aimed at putting Québec in its place was secured, did consider it. In fact, they did so aloud in a very fitting epilogue to a Canadian typical career. Chrétien who played the same role vis-à-vis Québec intimately knows the tactics involved, thanks to Paul Martin and friends.

 

These are some of the reasons why I had told my classes that Trudeau was best described as a ''pirouette, a figurative expression borrowed without acknowledgment by Granatstein (who aside from the Government Party archives might thus be presumed to have at the very least some indirect access to Echelon and its pervasive invading habits, if not to the Mossad elements in it.) and by his editor but in a sycophantic and rather misleading sense! ''Pirouette'', for demonstrated vacuous theatric and an ingrained « watch me », stuffed-up, adversarial and conceited arrogance which failed to impress civil libertarian T.C. Douglas. A courageous ''brilliance'' expressed mainly when it is safe and beneficial to do so, as illustrated by the ''pirouette'' performed behind the Queen's back in a royalist colony, or by the dropping of his pants on the Chinese Wall probably rehearsed during his old Harvard days. The point here is that the formation of this sort of personal doctrinaire historical bloc (to borrow Gramsci's phrase) is not  and strictly individual: in a great measure, it is the uncritical, conceited product of the institutional and historical context in which one lives with his/her own degree of class consciousness. Trudeau was not alone. You can safely replicate the same analysis for Lafontaine, Dorion, Laurier and generally all provincial premiers, except René Lévesque and TC Douglas.(22) A doctrinaire context offering only a rarefied atmosphere can only breed doctrinaire and obfuscated minds and widespread intellectual and ethical misery. It simply suffocates ordinary, normal historical and individual becoming. It thus represents an unbearable socio-political perversion.

In the end, the only short-term achievements of Trudeau can be traced to his minority government, but this is only true because the apparatchicks of the NDP had temporarily lost the ethico-intellectual hegemony once held by the authors of the Regina Manifesto to a small group of academics known as the Waffles and their associated peers. These were influenced by the Marxist subterranean impact pervading all the social sciences and disguised as modernization, dependency and other such half-baked concepts. Politically however they were largely excluded thanks to the personal contribution of NDP leaders cum anti-communist fighters (in fact, they were excluded just as unceremoniously as a N. Penner was kept outside the NDP by a David Lewis!).  Intellectually speaking Broadbent, for instance, never went beyond the peculiarlyEnglish version of political science exposed by Duverger and reformulated in pseudo-Marxian jargon by Milliband! Will it be Politicswith a big or small p, then ? What can be concluded is that aside for the lone René Lévesque, Trudeau had no real nemesis in either right-wing or social-democratic Canada nor for that matter in Québec. They were all the same multifaceted faces of the same (kaleidoscopic) mirrorworking hard to preserve their own access to their ''manger'', to use a ''word'' from a ''beautiful loser'' who seems to follow the same route, albeit with some poetical and spiritual fancies of his own, while private newspaper and media owners strive by knowingthat in such a soulless world the medium is indeed the message! Not surprisingly, this mental bent applies to the vertical and horizontal mosaics too, which bodes either well or ill depending on your class point of view. (Immigrants themselves might perhaps be partially excused. Through a subtle eugenic and socially Darwinian immigration policy, immigrants to this country now have to post a bond amounting to little less than one million Canadian dollars, which presumably allows Canada to talk about humanitarian needs and democracy in the proper world arenas. Even the needs for domestics to Ottawa's major civil servants and politicians households and the nation's well-to-do are meticulously worked out in this typical immigration policy which characteristically goes unquestioned.) As, all of them, then. Yet, the true story of the Canadian people, the story of its class struggles, is never taught, never written and still less published, aside for very few exceptions. Apparently this hinterland country does not need it more than it needed to offer a job to Einstein!

 

Needless to say, an unlivable religious or political system requires some specific mediations to retain its stability. Canada has therefore established itself as a diffused and pervasive police State. A small country by its demography, it uses all the heavy intelligence and surveillance machineries conceived by the Americans and typically exploits the most intrusive and sensitive private material with the help of other English-speaking White members of the Commonwealth in order to escape any possible law suits. Tsarist or communist Russia was quite primitive in this respect and therefore draw large domestic and foreign critics over its direct and visible ideological and political repression methods. No such undemocraticbehaviour is needed in Canada. Legitimate political dissent is instead unlawfully suppressed along with any independent forms of human intelligence through a pitiless but occulted selective process based on intrusive intelligence meddling and harassment, with the tacit agreement of all established parties and pressure groups, including the NDP. This, of course, does not preclude widespread plagiarism and other forms of behind-the-scene plain and widespread robbery. Indeed, it encourages it to the extend that it is wrongly believed that these actions would be hard to prove in a court of law. (The overt and covert complicity of many judges and lawyers is, in the main, acquired through the original selection process itself and becomes part of the systemic subservient mentality) Aside from some exceptions, Canada is largely successful with its collective lobotomization: not surprisingly the worse Nietzscheans of the day are quietly striving in the country where their conception of voluntary servitude for both the masses and the Nietzschean meritorious elites is already an accomplished reality. Administrative and legal injustice has thus become the norm and strictly depends on the widespread employment of the most crass, accultured and ignorant persons as the professional voyeurs and informants required by such a system (many of them alcoholics and drug addicts, badly desintoxicated and morally deprived. The same crews who need to legalize the $ 6 to 8 billions a year potential drug business for strictly professional motives.) These are persons who could hardly tell Freud from the bible, in which ever version you'd refer to it. But persons who know that they are systemically protected: neither deny nor confirm, does this motto ring a bell ? It sure does not in Parliament or in the courts of law, at least not a alarm bell. What Peter Newman failed to recognize, in his analysis of the making of the new Canadian elite and its servants, is that whereas the old colonial elite used a legal formation and its connections with the Foreign Office in order to establish its dominance, the new version mainly uses its fraudulent access and manipulation of the continental intelligence structures which, in effect, act as a permanent insider information venue. This is particularly obvious in Québec, since the early nineties. Nepotism is a normal metastatic growth of such a system. This is meritocracy as it is defined in this country! The same general mentality pervades the unions and the pseudo-left as Jaggy Singh and a few others have been forced to learn the hard way! Very deleterious cultural and socio-economic consequences naturally follow, just as you might expect, and pervades all aspects of life. The constitutional setting, together with the modern surveillance tools,  allowed Canada to anticipate the returnof a scandrelous political culture: peace, order and good government is now interpreted as a justification for an all-out war on critical thought and ordinary common sense. Trudeau's forma mentis is only on particularly tragic and laughable version of a patiently nurtured collective ''mind set'', ultimately resting on the colonial Burkean heritage enshrined in the constitution. An heritage which made Scotland pre-devolution status desirable in Québec, as literature lucidly testified! For the pusillanimous minds who believe in ''recurrent returns'', Pierre Elliott Trudeau must be an avatar of Bond Head, performing the same sorts of services to his federal country for the benefice of the same sorts of masters! The work of entropy can be guessed but admittedly  its extent is still to be scientifically ascertained in these ''ascending returns'' toward ''midnight''! The Charter says it all since its first article squarely confines all the freedoms and rights it pretends to protect to what is deemed reasonable by the elites in such a typically Burkean democracy. The serpent thus bites its own tail, enclosing all into its suffocating coils.      

 

A constitution worthy of the name enhances human and citizen behavior, it does not systemically mutilate it. Whatever can be added, one thing is certain: if passed, Part III of the European constitutional treaty is likely to induce even greater individual and collective damages in the form of conformist Burkean/Nietzschean conceit and regressive doctrinaire social blindness. The heritage of Enlightenment as well as all past democratic and popular conquests are therefore at risk. However, this will necessarily trigger the same republican and revolutionary awakening call which constitutes the best of its own typically European heritage and whose spirit cannot be so easily dominated.

Conclusion: A return to Reason and to common constitutional sense.

 

All parties, movements and union organizations of the Left should quickly initiate the resistance against this inequitable constitutional treaty. But it should do so intelligently without permanently hindering the prospect of  European integration. We are against neoliberalism as a ''revealed truth'' but we certainly remain staunchly in favor of European political and democratic integration. This citizens' resistance can be organized without any complex because the Enlarged Union is already ensured by the Nice Treaty. Nothing vital will be lost through a strong popular mobilization initiated at this time in order to obtain a few but essential corrections. Indeed, the main countries in the Enlarged Union might still be convinced to take some of the neoliberal arrogance away from the constitutional treaty before presenting it for citizens' approval and thus risk its massive rejection and the ensuing transversal divisions this will create. As far as the Left is concerned, we cannot miss this opportunity, since the existing amending formula will make later corrections extremely hard to achieve. This difficulty will naturally be increased when it deals with vested economic interests. To obtain a moderate but meaningful revision of the present constitutional text, few measures have to be coordinated at the EU level:

 

a) First, the widespread explanation of the foreseeable consequences of the neoliberal constitutional coup accomplished by the enshrining of Part III in the future constitution. There is, in my view, no need at this stage to confuse the issue with ethereal and proto-Nietzschean matters concerning « federalism » according to Habermas et al. versus ''confederalism'' by someone else. We should stick to the essential and do so in practical terms. In any case, the proposed treaty already enhances the European Parliament composition and role. This represents a very significant progress when compared to the Nice Treaty. Above all it does not preclude any future initiative aimed at strengthening supranational democratic processes in the EU as is demonstrated, for instance, by the possibilities offered by the ''reinforced cooperations'' or the Eurogroup etc. Reality will eventually work its way in this field in the respect of all.

 

b) Second, the clear subordination of all economic principles alluded to in the constitutional text to the democratic determination by the peoples and citizens themselves of the desirable level to be achieved by the social and other objectives enshrined in the Constitution. A clear and succinct interpretation rule to that effect should be added at the very beginning of Part III. Alternatively, or better still, simultaneously, this might take the form of the addition in the constitution proper of specifically defined Social criteria on the par with existing Maastricht criteria. Failing this the complete erasing of Part III from the constitutional text (and the subsequent correction of the remaining text) should be demanded.

 

c)Third, the necessity to submit the final constitutional text to a referendum in each and every Nation State belonging to the EU. Germany should perhaps consider a national election as a substitute for the referendum. The approval by national parliaments does not carry a sufficient weight since it merely represents the wish of a conjonctural governmental majority or political coalition which is hardly enough to legitimize a constitution in a multinational context. This is particularly so since we are dealing here with the continent comprising the very Nations which were at the core of the Westphalian regime of sovereign Nations-States which have spent many centuries consolidating their cultural and civilizational autonomy.

 

In any event, the constitutional treaty will have to be accepted unanimously. This means that our fight is a good fight with good prospects. If the opposition is disciplined and strong enough, these essential corrections can still be achieved even in the eventuality some major countries will choose to sign the treaty with the sole agreement of their national Parliament. (M. Schroeder, the valiant suicidal tenor of Agenda 2010, has already prevailed himself of a constitutional provision forbidding referendums in Germany.)

 

Maastricht was necessary to coordinate the establishment of the Euro. Its neoliberal consequences (which, in my view, were conjonctural and not inherent) made it unpalatable to many countries belonging to the EU but not to the Euro Zone. An intelligent compromise, worthy of the solidarity among European peoples, can still be worked out. I have shown that this could be achieved elegantly by the suppression of a few misconceived concepts here and there and by the addition of an interpreting clause at the very beginning of Part III . As a mere non-constitutional annex, Part III, in its present formulation, might have had some residual usefulness as a capitalist coordinating mechanism in the first stages of the welcoming process of new members inside the economic setting of the EU. However, the interpretation rule proposed above would apply equally to all members and thus allow for its otherwise innocuous insertion in the constitution itself. In particular, this would ensure that European integration will not be placed uniquely at the service of a post-communist Eastward imperialism: armed with a decent and ideologically impartial constitution, the citizens of the new members States would therefore be able to defend their basic social interests with a greater ease without passing for the new Ossies of capitalist Europe.

 

Paul De Marco, professor of International Relations.

Copyright July 13, 2004.

                       

NOTES:

 

1)liberazione.it 13-07-2004.

2)See Louis Botha's South African holistic vision

3) 3-a) Censitarianis a neologism which is urgently needed to describe the regression towards an original liberal democracy where only a few were paying taxes (i.e. « le cens » in French, hence the word censitaire) and were thus uniquely offered the electoral franchise. Some post-WWII institutions are censitarian by their status (for instance the IMF and the World bank); others recognize the one State, one vote principle but are dominated inreality by the private interests prevailing in the most powerful capitalist States. Other international institutions established before WWII, such as the ILO, are genetically ''tripartitein the sense that even the union side officially represented within their ranks were anti-socialist, and to an even greater extend, anti-communist, thus instituting them as part of the bourgeois, post-Bolshevik legitimation strategy born from the Versailles conference. Domestically speaking, what passes for fiscal responsibility is but a calculated ploy intent on slowly pushing the proletariat off the Income tax rolls, thus lowering the cost of labour for globally roaming multinational firms. Of course, the right to vote no longer needs to be officially taken away, as the United States example shows. You only need to apply workfarerules with great determination and ferocity. The systemic working of an unfettered market will soon pauperize the workers and reduce them to such a state of discouragement and alienation that they will no longer care to spend the efforts needed to remain part of the democratic'' body politics and be registered as electors. A carefully preserved abstentionism which concerns about half of the electorate (namely, that part which does not belong to the so-called self-contented classes) is less risky than a tyrannical withdrawal of the electoral franchise. It is, in fact, so effective that it even allows the dominant classes to instill guilt in the minds of  the citizens who refuse to participate in the democratic processes. A Nietzschean good conscience is quickly gained, even in unlikely quarters! (American reformers should perhaps demand the preparation of an automatic electoral lists.)

  3-b) Likewise, I find the neologism ''scandrelous'' necessary. The word ''rogue'' has become a silly, philo-Semite, Christian and Jewish Nietzschean insult wrapped into a civilizational injury committed against all citizens. It is the chosen word of simple-minded and crassly ignorant ''pitres'',  light-mindedly forgetting Stalingrad, among other episodes. These silly abusers and merchandisers of a selective Holocaust and of a censitarian democracy are often demonstrably themselves plain criminals in the eyes of international laws and human decency, though they have pathetically persuaded themselves to be entitled, safely from behind the scene, to treat other citizens as ''evil'' or as the ''last of men''! ''Rogue'' cannot therefore be used due to these dirty warmongering connotations. Trotsky used the term  ''gangster''. Nevertheless, what is at stake is much more dangerous than a mere mafia-like deviance. The word ''scandrel'' and the neologism ''scandrelous'' have all the right and cultivated Nietzschean  Zarathustrean connotations. Contrary to 'rogue' it is not gratuitous. Nietzsche, after all, is their chosen ''master'', at least in public..

4) Fred Block was unusually perceptive when he offered this analysis.

5) ''5 critères pour l'Europe sociale'', par Stéphane Hessel, Pierre Larrouturou et Michel Rocard, in  www.lemonde.fr, 08.06.04

6) Quebeckers are doubly subjected to the voluntary servitudedistilled by the constitutional and cultural context. This makes their leaders as sheepishly prone as a pitiful Mulroney and other Canadian elite, but admittedly with much less credulity, to the fraudulent (by definition) theocratic and philo-Semite sirens songs of a Ron Rosenbaum. The generalization of his peculiar idiosyncrasy is unacceptable. This personage pretends to be entitled to define ex cathedra (or is it through a genetic origin?) what is goodor evilfor the whole world except a chosen few who presumably are beyond or above such mundane considerations ! You just need to think of well-known pitresto realize how original and useful he is. On the false and dangerous pretenses of such simple-minded persons like this obscure Rosenbaum see the chapter entitled Préambule et laicità and the five subsequent chapters in my article Europe des Nations, Europe sociale et pacte de stabilità (idem. See the article « In praise of Reason and of the secular State », in the Racism/Exclusivism section of this same site.) Furthermore, Rosenbaum and people like him should really be the last to pretend to judge and criticise Marxists, for ovious reasons. Should we advice him to read Joachim Fest? I am afraid that both ideologically and methodologically these people are well past any objective research. It would be a loss of time.

7) John Stuart Mill was somewhat of an Utopian with a partial understanding of Smith's and of Ricardo's labour based conception of political economy, but he certainly was not a pre-Rawlsian. Considering a possible historical stage where machines could inherit most production tasks, he wisely noted the obvious Enlightenment and humanist sentiment on the issue. He wrote: Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself from the essay On Liberty included in John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Collins/Fontana, 1962, ISBN 0 00 633065 7, p188  

8) Brzesinsky is still cultivating its old technetronicdreams which far from seeing productivity as a way to liberate Mankind from alienated work, sees it instead as a threat for his preferred cast and theocratic society, one where the Brzesinsky of the world and the CIA would continue to finance all over the world a Wojtyla and most anti-labour and anti-socialist leaders similar to those churned out by Solidarity, etc ....Together with the Hungtington, Sharon et al. they dream aloud about a joint US and Israeli domination of both the Eurasian landmass and the World Oceanic crown. Other subaltern allies might be sought as gauleiters and mercenaries. Above all, these are valued because they can offer a post-hoc justification for a pseudo-multilateral world where Christian and Jewish Zionists, backed by Washington and Tel Aviv, cook up the meal while the other members of the United Nations Security council and General Assembly are all relegated to the domestic role of washing the dishes. They have already convinced the American and Israeli citizens that they must trade their civil liberties for a fake security, useful only to the beleaguered wealthier classes consciously unleashing a preventive war of civilization. They have forced pro-Zionist Muslims to dangerously go along with the lunatic power grab over the oil reserves of the Muslim world, in both the Middle East and in Africa. Their regional ''regime change'' policy represents the most visible aspect of this strategic choice. It is an aggressive policy that seeks the creation of a so-called ''Great Middle East''. One that would be compatible with a Greater Israel and the building of an illegitimate Solomon Temple over the ashes of Al Aqsa in East Jerusalem. Sooner or later, this philo-Semite Nietzschean imperial power grab over most of the Earth natural resources by force is bound to lead to a major confrontation with populous India and China, two countries that need a stable and peaceful world under the United Nations' Charter in order to proper in peace. This truly is akin to a global Apartheid regime. Already we can detect the thought and pretense of Louis Botha's holistic vision of the world in the most ludicrous philo-Semite Nietzschean theories openly discussed in various think-tanks and in today's Pentagon. Europe must steer clear from this dangerous course. It must naturally insists on the respect by all of the UN Charter. But it must also understand in a non-ideological way that the peculiar ideological evolution of present day America and Israel would not have been possible without the  global destructiveness brought about by unfettered neoliberalism although, admittedly, its roots cannot be restricted to it.

9) René Passet among others has put a percentage on this increasing inequality. In the European context, the labour share has eroded about 10 % in the last few years. Claude Julien's lucid appraisal of the neocon counterrevolution had already alerted us to the fact that the share of the last two deciles of the US population was quickly melting away. The situation is worsened in that it now affects the core of the ''middle class'', the bulwark of post-World War Two American democracy. An ominous change in itself, which has the potential of ushering a social situation worse than that experienced during the Thirties.

10) Trotsky's Bolshevik position on the USSR and Stalinism should be appraised from his Scandinavian analysis. It should, in fact, become a required reading for all, as a cure for opportunistic anachronism and what still deserves to be called ''rightist deviations''. See ''Bilan de l'expérience finlandaise'' (25 avril 1940) in www.trotsky-oeuvre.org , Section Défense du marxisme''. In Trotsky's theory, the conceptual and practical difference between a social versus a merely political revolution is of paramount importance. Therefore, Modes of production and the epochs they can sustain are similarly so.

11) See « Réformes démocratiques révolutionnaires ou lamentable Rossinante du réformisme? », in Tous ensemble.

12) When it came to the ultimate fate of capitalism, Schumpeter was a pessimist. His creative destruction was merely conceived as a rear-garde strategy to slow down the inevitable decline of the CMP. His classical formation told him the Marxists were right in thinking that the tendency to concentration and centralization, not ''competition'' or the interplay of ''supply and demand'', constituted the real laws of motion of capitalism despite all the Sherman Act and other Antitrust peripheral legitimizing gimmicks. Competition and supply and demand remain overdetermined by overall systemic constraints and social demand as Marx had shown since the Parisian Manuscripts of 1844.. Following their characteristic deconstruction streak, neoliberals are merely and foolishly attempting to operate what I called a ''reversed Schumpeterism''. That is to say, they are heavy-handedly using occulted but direct State intervention in order to achieve the destruction of all State enterprises and regulations on a global scale, in the vain hope of securing a tranquil context for infinite capitalist accumulation. Their dream is as rational as their associated dream concerning a New (mainly intangible) Economy miraculously abstracted from all Business cycles! The critics of these socio-economic voodoo creeds and practices should underline the empirical evidence which conclusively shows that, in the end, deregulated and privatized services are more costly to procure for everyone, even when they are concretely restricted to the minority of privileged self-contend classes, which alone can pay for them at a decent level. Above all, they should now forcefully point to the theoretical and practical contradictions of the neocons' core notion, especially since the fusion and merger tendencies have been strongly aided by their blind and ideologically motivated policies. Indeed, these deleterious tendencies were supported on a world scale by their own misguided policies, thus generating a new tendency to the synchronization of the business cycles which, mutatis mutandis , will necessarily aggravate the next national and global structural crisis of capital. Reverse Schumpeterism was but the first step toward a Nietzschean ''return'' to general serfdom! The present preventive, quasi-Apartheid, war of civilization series constitutes the ominous next step. This is a course which has to be stopped by all lovers of democracy, be this in the form of advanced capitalist democracy or in the form of a transitional socialist multifaceted democracy (that is to say one that is capable to add full-blown representative, participatory, industrial, and social democracy to the strictly liberal version of parliamentary democracy which is presently hegemonic in the guise of a strictly formal and practically censitarian ''parliamentary democracy'').

13) We owe M.Francis Wurtz and the communist newspaper L'Humanité to have sounded the alarm on the earlier draft of Part III. (see ''Voyage à l'intérieur de la Constitution'', www.humanite.fr, 11-09-03) However, they seem to have focused their criticisms on the Maastricht criteria and the role of the ECB. I do not share these specific criticisms. Indeed, I think that they are totally misleading on these scores, as is shown by the relationship between the neoliberal tax cuts and the budgetary deficit of the Raffarin government, among others. This deficit inexorably translates into the growth of the national debt which the Left and the proletariat will be asked to repay later once they will regain governmental power. At this historical juncture, the price stability enforced by the Maastricht Criteria is both necessary for the economic coordination of the Euro Zone as well as for the institutional containment of the right-wing majority frenetic and regressive tax cutting mania. See ''Europe  élargie, zone euro et Europe sociale'' (11/09/2003) International Political Economy section, http://lacommune1871.tripod.com.) In the same Section see also my ''Keynésianisme, marxisme et pacte de stabilité'' and ''Europe des Nations, Europe sociale et constitution''.

14) When it comes to these perversions, Canada has indeed an advantage given the contortions generated by its unresolved national question enveloped into a Burkean constitution. Pathetic Pierre Elliott Trudeau once won a minority government, a feat in itself given the pronounced undemocratic majoritarian, first-past-the-post electoral system which ordinarily churns out comfortable majority governments with just around 40 % of the electoral vote. Together with his like-minded team of self-described Machiavellians, he quickly scrambled for a way out. This gave Canadians a transitional farce known as the ''Third Option''. It was a calculated ploy evidently far from the basic cast's wisdom of theocratic Buddhist monks known as the Middle Road, but as surely abstracted from labour's popular wisdom! Essentially, it meant fooling the citizens (and the pre-disposed NDP leaders) into believing that the alternatives were either two strawmen (''continental integration'' and ''continuation of traditional Liberal go-between policies'' which had just been rejected by the electors) or the luminous way out appropriately called the ''Third Option'' (Eventually, its main achievement was the soon to be dismantled FIRA, the foreign investment review agency, which, in any event, remained far short from the prevalent discourse of the time concerning a UN Code of Conduct for the Multinational Corporations compatible with national industrial strategies and citizens' rights.) Of course, once firmly back in power, Trudeau paved the way for further continental integration: he characteristically attempted to call it ''fair trade'' instead of ''free trade'' while nominating his Trilateralist friend, D. Macdonald, to head a Royal Commission invested with the mandate to study the ways and means to implement it the main issue remained how to sacrifice the Canadian proletariat while saving the privileges of the Canadian capitalist classes. This led some people to quickly dream about replacing old frameworks such as the Auto Pact with the negotiation of  ''world mandates'' to be carried out by established branch-plants of US corporations, while keeping a firm grip on their own role as the main (unproductive) salespersons of the country's abundant natural resources. The present disciples of Rawls and Giddens do not even bother telling us who are the new scary strawmen in their own neoliberal fables, nor why we should fear them more than their own failed, warmongering and deleterious Third Way!

15) See in particular, the distressing piece ''Il faut ratifier le projet de Constitution'' by Bertrand Delanoe and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in  , 02-07-04. Former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's, ''Vite, la Constitution de l'Europe!'', in www.lemonde.fr, 09-07-04 is revealing and astonishing at the same time, but not unexpected, especially as concerns Part III ! Conversely, the article entitled ''Pour une Europe des services publics'' by Stéphane Rodrigues and Gilles Sabart, in lemonde.fr, 02-07-04, eloquently demonstrate two main points when read in the light of what has just been said: a) a ''constitution'' is a very different institutional reality compared to ''ordinary laws'' ; b) ordinary laws and future treaties will be strictly constrained by the constitution and by its spirit and letter, despite democratic pressures. Especially since it can be considered as a new ''continent'', we should all strive to maintain the emphatic conceptual and practical rigor Althusser adopted with respect to Montesquieu.  

16) M. Decaillot, Le juste prix, Ed. L'Harmattan, 2003. We are closer here to the good Docteur Sommethan to Marx!Despite the date of publication!!

17) See Les conséquences socio-économiques de MM. Volcker, Reagan et Cie'' in the International Political Economy Section of the site http://lacommune1871.tripod.com

18)A useful concept proposed by Prof. Presthus.

19)Aside from this non-Trudeauite discovery of significant aspects of ''distinct society'' nested within the original 1867 Constitution, I similarly claim to have been the first to point out that the main national characteristics which distinguish modern Canada from the United States lie with the specific traits emanating from the Canadian Welfare State. In 1939, Canada's trading and financial dependence to the UK shifted in favor of the new continental imperial masters. The Canadian ambassador to Washington had been actively telling the Canadian government headed by his brother-in-law Bennett about the New Dealers' efforts, but it was too late for this anti-labour, ultra-conservative party. Nevertheless, the Canadians continued to build their Welfare State even after the New Deal came to an abrupt end with Roosevelt's death and Wallace's defeat against Truman. The Canadian stage was set for the second half of the Twentieth century. What on Earth distinguishes ''us'' from the Americans as a nation? I modestly take this socio-political understanding to be more convincing than the oft repeated, masochistic and belaboured attempts by ex-mandarins in their Memoirs to turn a fake bilingualism into the sole defining difference which distinguishes us inside an otherwise homogeneous continent. Since the War Room has famously long ears that extend into the nation's classrooms, I hereby challenge ex-Prime Minister Mulroney to pretend otherwise. Similarly, as Ed Broadbent might know, the discussion on electoral reform and campaign financing at the federal level owes me something too (Typically, though, Broadbent and his friends tried to be original. They took the theoretical opportunity to argue in favour of a proportional system of representation at the federal level, one which unfortunately goes against specific 1867 constitutional norms manly regarding the representation of the Altlantic provinces in the Commons and the Senat. Presumably it did not escape Romanov's and Chretien's  friend that Québec's demographic, hence electoral, weight in the federation is steadily diminishing while that of the West increases! Proportionality would also do a lot for the desertification of rural Canada, particularly above the first 50 miles extending North of the 49th Parallel! The democratization of the present system by the addition of a second electoral round would instead allow electors themselves to choose both the party they prefer (during the first round) and rationally decide the classe and political alliances eventually destined to form the government which they would rather have, as a first or second choice (this choice would be exercised during the second round, when electors could at least eliminate candidates they do not like in the event their first choice has been defeated during the first round ). Instead of aggravating presently tense federal-provincial relationships, such an electoral system would help to diffuse tension: In fact, for the first time in their history, it would allow Canadian citizens themselves to choose their own form of accommodation among all the peoples composing the federation. Under such a slightly modified electoral regime the signing of a comprehensive trade regime such as Nafta by a government elected by only 43 % of the popular vote would be a thing of the past. The fact that academics do not have the honesty to give their reference, even when they have altered the ordinary way of thinking, does not change the nature of my contributions. But it speaks directly to the selection process operated by universities which are nevertheless funded mainly by the proletariat tax revenues.

20)The Trudeauite "citizens plus" notion offered by Alan C. Cairns might benefit from these sober Marxist considerations as well as by an understanding of the influence exercised by available descriptions of the power sharing arrangements practiced by the Iroquois federation in early European pre-revolutionary theories, such as Rousseau's. The development of these political theories was also heavily, if subterranean, influenced by the humanist denunciations of Las Casas and by Diderot'sSupplément au voyage de Bougainville . These, among others, had on obvious decentratingeffect over the accepted socio-political relationship. Aside from the lingering Burkean conception of citizenship, the problem in Canada, as well as in Québec, is not so much citizenship versus a pseudo-leveling assimilation but the instrumentalization of citizenshipas a tightly controlled bilingual leveling assimilation process without any fair quiproquo. In other words, the authentic democratic respect of genuine differences without arbitrary, though constitutionally based, discrimination. Objective equality needs specific political, social, economic and cultural mediations but can never be conceived as a plus. The full equality of some citizens cannot detract from the full equality of others, on the contrary it represents the precondition of all citizens involved. In more practical terms, in few short essays send to some First Nations, I pointed out the increased weight of current demographic trends and thus the need for First Nations to quickly obtain autonomous financial resources and a degree of domestic sovereigntyin order to be able to address their specific problems in their own terms, an avenue partly explored by Québec since. Needless to say, the driving motivation should be the insurance of fellow citizens' socio-economic development and dignity and not the existing, purely constitutional, timetable, one which was included within the 1982 constitution as a further Damoclesian sword over Québec's and ordinary Canadian citizens' heads.As equal citizens, we should all deplore with Jean Malaurie (see his two volumes book Hummocks) the continued destruction of the Hudson Bay's archives which should instead be considered as a national and human heritage despite, or because, they illustrate the exploitative living conditions imposed on native peoples in the Company's trading posts.The connotation of the expression “Citizen plus” could either refer to the targeted domestic patronizing implied by the publicity of an already established brand of detergent or, more likely, it can refer to the practice of US intelligence agencies which marked particularly sensitive documents with the label “top secret plus”. The author might or might not be aware of this particular origin. The fact remains that Trudeau, from whom he pretends to borrow the expression, could not have ignored it. When it comes to the relationships of First Nations with the various police forces, both in the US and Canada, the expression becomes quite charged. Moreover, Trudeau’s simplistic comprehension of “nationalism” as an infinite regression leading to the inevitable brake-up of the country instead of a new “accommodation” among its elite renders the expression “citizen plus” ironic at best! Leaving aside the legitimate antiquarian pretense of academia, the real issue remains the democratic unfolding of the political and economic process of empowerment of the First Nations in Canada. This process cannot be conceived as a “plus” or “minus” from an inexistent political norm which cannot be reduced to the impact of a federal charter of rights that was permanently restrained by the “notwithstanding clause” thanks to the efforts of both federal and provincial conservative politicians. Be it as it may, First Nations cannot be reduced to the status of federal pupils any longer. Nor can this empowerment process itself be negated since it is now enshrined in the constitution of the land. This should entitle the First Nations of this country to think of themselves, first and foremost, as Canadian citizens like everybody else. That is to say as citizens who do not need to be treated as social cases to be managed from the top down but instead as equal human beings who should enjoy the same degree of national distinctiveness (i.e. social and national rights as opposed to strictly formal individual rights) as any other founding groups in Canada, without detracting in the least from their acquired treaty rights or from the unwritten equivalent thereof. In fact, this evolution can already be seen at work in the new territories already created or planned in the Northern part of the land.

21)See for instance: ''Développement ne rime pas forcément avec croissance'' par Jean-Marie Harribey, in Le Monde diplomatique of July 2004, pp 18, 19 and the earlier issues mentioned by the article itself. Assuming that the Club of Rome's initial hypotheses were pertinent despite Cambridge able refutation, the theoreticians of décroissance would still need to take into consideration the blinding fact that 20 % of the World population monopolizes 80 % of all the resources available on Earth. Capitalism is a system based on social production but private accumulation. It is driven by private profit and therefore produces an extraordinary wasteful use of all resources, including human labour. This state of affair will not be changed by any puritanical invocation of  ''décroissance'' but instead by the substitution of collectively controlled economic regulation and redistribution based on ''social surplus value'' rather than on private profits. The necessity of a more equitable Social redistribution of wealth remains paramount notwithstanding the quantitative method of calculating the GDP. They should also remember that capitalism as a mode of production produces a structural squandering trend in order to sustain a socially skewed consumption. Trying to explain the need for décroissance in the framework of bourgeois economics amounts to a paradoxical attempt to justify, in pseudo-rational economic terms, the continued production of capitalist mass-consumed products devised to last only a few years or to explain the selling (at marked up) price of new cars while the surplus production of new models is systematically withdrawn from the market and destroyed. Under the ''décroissance'' régime, these general phenomena structurally produced by capitalism as a mode of production would be glossed over while the private behavior of exploited small consumers would become the object of exogenous behavioural change and internalization of  induced guilt! As the refrain goes : ''I've got nothing, but nothing is plenty for me!!'' Even the Nietzschean gospels of the lower clergy could thus be disregarded in favour of a virtuous ''paradise'' inside which, as Milton said, ''the devil laughs''. Arguing for general décroissance is truly worthy of people who are used to obtain their cake and eat it too, at society's expense. Let us simply add that in Third World countries, one cannot start discussing about social redistribution forms without first proceeding to an agrarian reform followed by a social reform. In the end, to put egalitarian revolutions in perspectives, Dumont's lesson should be remembered: at least twenty years before the Rwanda genocide, but contrary to the after-the-fact vulture mania of so-called proponents of humanitarian ingerence, Dumont had correlated demographic growth and the unequal distribution of land as well as the ongoing under-development of industries which are usually tied to a vital urban sector growth. He sounded the alarm, in vain. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had also demonstrated how agrarian reform is a necessary first step for modernization, especially modernization of a socialist kind. Despite the ferocious and illegal embargo, they also demonstrated how the socialist mode of production could satisfy human material, cultural and ethical needs while adopting a sustainable use of natural resources. The PUND human development index illustrates this evidence years after years. Why is it then that the so-called adept of ''décroissance'' do not defend a plurality of democratic regimes, with a declared preference for multiple forms of socialist democracy? Sustainability cannot be had without sober conceptual and ethical coherence!

The ''décroissance'' thesis is available in English. See Serge Latouche, ''the world downscaled'' in the English version of Le Monde diplomatique at http://mondediplo.com, December 2003.

22) I personally believe that my criticisms of the Baldwin-Lafontaine forma mentis and alliance along these lines induced some persons to characteristically reverse the logic and to institute the Baldwin-Lafontaine conferences series as an ideological contribution to the post-Trudeau, post-constitutional repatriation, federal nation-building centralizing efforts. M. John Ralston Saul would personally oblige me to publicly say what he knows about this matter. If he does not do so publicly without wasting time he should know that he is being defined here for what he is and for eternity, but by his own choosing.

The Canadian Parliament and l'Assemblée Nationale du Québec should rapidly do the same. Modestly, I am more than entitled to believe that their collective honesty and their democratic image is at stake. As is their complicity with a prolonged and heinous ideologically-motivated crime.

   

 

Annex :  Social surplus value and public sectors

 

In Tous ensemble and in the chapter concerning Cuban socialism available in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilism, I have shown the difference between a bourgeois and a scientific comprehension of ''economic efficiency''. Indeed, this constitutes the unresolved internal contradiction of all brands of Keynesianism. Through Sraffa, Keynes came to value Marx's cycles of capital and their role in the reproduction of the system, in other words, their role in « macroeconomy ». But Keynes, like for instance Pigou, was unable to reconcile his micro-economy with his macro-economy, although he was by training and professional acquaintance more of a practical man involved in governmental affairs and thus more willing to give macro-economic equilibria a significant role. Perhaps it could be said that Keynes anticipated what English (mainly Marxist or Marxian) epistemologues came to call backsight as opposed to foresight: in social matters we cannot foresee the future; even if we were (as Simon noted) this very knowledge would interfere with the final outcome each time we chose to act upon it. However, we are free to determine desirable final objectives and work to achieve them while correcting our progression as we go. This epistemological reality and the new feeling of empowerment it procured, though poorly understood at the time, explains the initial practical fascination with Keynesianism and at the same time the reason which ultimately caused its downfall (i.e specifically when the initial conditions associated to the national operation of the Kahn multiplicator ceased to be favourable - namely the extroversion of the Multiplier.

This epistemological approach can be accepted as a valid and useful general hypothesis. This is because what Marx called ''concrete in thoughtconcepts, such as the fundamental equations of the labour law of value, are scarce and cannot provide a priori the full analysis of the historical forms (modes, epochs etc ) which they take. Yet everyone would understand intuitively that the final desirable objectives have to rest on ascertainable scientific premises and facts even if they cannot always be exhaustively so. (A given universeis rarely comprehended  entirely in the sense where general lawspertaining to it can be said to have universalvalidity for the considered universeitself. As such interactions with other universes cannot disprove them but at most create the need to reformulate them in a different dialectical form.)  

In the end, Keynesianism is entrapped into the liberal and neoliberal micro-economic ''efficiency'' trap. No one who is appraised of a minimal brushing of economic history can ignore that this peculiar sort of ''efficiency'' embodies the main capitalist contradiction which explains all its recurrent structural crisis and will ultimately cause its ''dépassement. Nothing better than public services illustrate the point: a private utility sector ultimately leads to a California or Alberta energy fiasco. The desingenious proposal to have the State build the infrastructures (which are profitable only in the long term) while leaving the short-term operation and profits in private hands, could only have been devised in neocon think-tanks characterized by a group-thing mentality and often motivated by a raw '' reconnaissance du ventre. (see for instance ''Biens publics: sauvons ce qui peut encore être sauvé'' .in Tous ensemble , pp 96-101 and « La branche sur laquelle ils sont confortablement assis », idem p 153). It would amount to the institution of ''theft'' instead of ''thrift'' as a capitalist virtue, a tentative which cannot be viable under capitalism as a systemic operating mode! This is clearer still when we are talking about the health, and educational sectors and the pensions systems. These, the so-called ''unproductive sectors'' of classical political economy, were understood by Marx to be at the core of systemic productivity. (Marx among other things mentioned the role of the education system in the formation of artisans and workers, a formation largely taken for granted by bourgeois economics). Economically speaking, health pertains to the reproduction of the active and passive labour power and its ''maintenance'' at a fully operational level. The efficiency of health units cannot be conceived on micro-economic terms, almost by definition. When it is, it either lead to an enormous squandering of public wealth, as is the case with the United States which currently spends around 16 % of its GDP in the sector against  9 %, on average, for European Countries, but with inferior results. Nor can you ever hope to reconcile a competitive micro-management of fragmented units with continued overall public financing because this would necessarily substitute a localized pursuit of profits at the detriment of the pursuit of public health objectives, as is demonstrated by the failed HMO experiment in a Great Britain espousing the Third Way methods. Here the logic of ''social surplus value'' has to dominate directly to properly measure efficiency and productivity and to ensure its controlled development.  The corresponding micro-economic efficiency can be retraced by what I called the « structure of v », the elements composing the use values exchanged for the wages. In an advanced capitalist State, the private wage is increasingly complemented by public transfers related to social services and contributory plans, and thus we have to talk of ''global net revenues'' (capitalist individual wage plus social transfers) in order to make sense of reality. A socialist country would give priority to ''global net revenues}'', hence to productivity enhancing social services, but would still keep a strict accounting track of individual wages in order to maintain a scientific control over ''social surplus value'' and thus be able to redistribute it with the maximum social fairness and the maximum economic efficiency. To sum up in a  lapidary form: the greater the part of socialized global net revenuesin a given Social Formation, the lower the wage cost to public and private enterprises and thus the greater the competitiveness of both. The productivity of France and Germany demonstrate this neatly especially if you take the average working week and paid holidays into account. However, notwithstanding their public speeches, neoliberals are not after greater micro and macro productivity but only after greater private profit and accumulation. They are intent on abusing  governmental power in order to expropriate public wealth for their own individual profit.

Universal public health insurance is an emblematic public sector since it helps alleviate both the effects of capitalist exploitation and of pure hazard (sickness, accidents etc) on human beings. It is revelatory of the neocons' mentality that they can conceive this as a sector that can be merchandised even in the countries which successfully established it. Nevertheless the neoliberal logic is percolating within the reformistleft, including some persons which could not be considered to consciously belong to the subservient ideological lower clergies.  

The logic of social surplus value is therefore the only one which coherently applies to the health sector. Opposing this evolved view to the predominant neoliberal merchant conception, I have pointed out, in previous occasions, the directions which needed and useful reforms should take. These reforms should be conceived as smooth recurrent adaptations to social and demographic trends and certainly not as a necessary butcher job. In an attempt to preventively dispel some damaging non-leftist concepts and, at the same time, to defend the present public system, let me sum up the main points which should be considered in any valid reform that would not be bent on surreptitiously bankrupting the sector in order to later legitimize its full or partial privatization:

The termination of the payment of doctors according to single medical acts which are reimbursed by the  public Health insurance system. Doctors should work 35 hours like anyone else and should be paid a fixed weekly (or monthly) wage. However, they should all be integrated within national research units and receive a bonus tied to their contributions in this area. Naturally the numerus closus which has no rational explanation other than that of protecting this peculiarly egoistic so-called ''liberal profession'' must be suppressed. It consciously create a typical Nietzschean competition! Governments should never tolerate doctors' blackmail over Health care and patients' rights and should react with a firm appeal to reason and to law when necessary, though doctors should naturally enjoy all the rights recognized to other categories of organized workers and public servants. Like it or not, patients cum tax payers are the doctors' real employers who pay their wages. Fundamental and applied research should be adequately funded to preserve the system scientific efficiency.

Furthermore the role of specialized nurses should be enhanced within very strict medical parameters.

The pharmaceutical aspects of public health systems need to be nationalized or at least intelligently socialized. It absorbs a great part of the cost and moreover exhibits the greatest rate of increase. This only serves the pharmaceutical private interests. The current regime leaves research and product development entirely in the hands of the pharmaceutical industry. The later pushes doctors to prescribe  new brand products and to entice patients to consume other products whose efficiency often resides in their placebo effects! Yet doctors' hourly pay is well taken care off while stiff and regressive penalties, legitimized as moderating tickets, are imposed to all patients in a laughable and irrational effortto control rising costs and consumption! If unchanged the situation will become worse due to the frenetic neoliberal race to obtain patent rights tied to the biological and genetic revolutions, a frenetic folly which threatens to patent living organisms. At a minimum then, the State should have the right to declare a given new and proven medication equivalent to a generic and determine the price at which it would be sold on its territory in exchange for the extension of the patent duration or other such negotiated conditions. In the end, the citizens themselves, through their elected representatives governments and other bodies, should keep the sole control over the determination of thelist of collectively reimbursed medications. A socialized medicine needs a socialized pharmaceutical sector in order to remain coherent and viable.

Emergency units should all be complemented by on site clinics. This would allow the assessment and orienting systems already in place to rapidly distinguish between serious cases to be treated by the Emergency wards and other lighter cases to be directed toward the on site clinic without unnecessarily making the patients guilty. Note that patients who are prone to use emergency wards are mostly hyper-rational: Either their family doctor is not available or they think they might need rapid access to a full medical examination involving the use of labs and scanning devises. The selection upon arrival will thus reduce the weight on the personnel of the emergency wards while drastically reducing the punishing waiting time presently imposed on patients. Eventual (though rare) errors in the early selection process would not be dramatic since the on site clinics would literally be located next door. Of course, the weekly payment of doctors would allow for the generalization of local clinics dispersed well over the whole territory. These would be fitted with essential labs and scanning equipments. This, in turn, would enhance the valuable research routinely done on chronic and social sicknesses which is often overlooked by private pharmaceutical companies either because it is too costly to fund the additional needed research and development or because they already have products that still need to be amortized or simply because they retain a strong profitability associated with the brand name.

Gerontology should be encouraged in medical schools. Geriatric practices should be generalized. This includes preventives medicines (chiropractors etc) and in-house treatment as long as possible in order to maintain the autonomy of the persons concerned. It should be noted that a national geriatric policy, just like a national daycare policy, would have a great job-creation potential. Moreover, it would involve highly qualified employment and would act as a leading sector for all intermediary sectors directly or indirectly related to it. This would ensure a largely national operation of the Kahn multiplicator involved. If you add socialized fitness clubs, bingo centers, communal gardening, cultural activities and the like to this strictly medical approach, you can immediately see the beneficial social and economic impact that could be derived from such an approach.

In a socialized (and, even more so, in an entirely nationalized) medicine framework, the number of hospital beds available would not constitute a problem per se. Instead, the number of fully operating hospitals, free of all bacterial and other pollutions, will remain a serious concern under any regime. The temporary closure and recurrent decontamination of hospitals, or at least of some of their wings, should be computed in the general picture. This imply a certain apparent regional redundancy. Given the accumulated cost to society of the unnecessary deaths and injuries caused by contaminated hospital as well as the increasing general costs due to bacterial resistance, the benefices of such planned recurrent preventive action should be precisely evaluated. Public research in these areas need to be enhanced. It might be useful to inquire into the bacterial defense of  the micro-organisms living in perfect symbiosis on our skin (in reality our first line of defense) in order to prepare the next line of antibiotics which have the potential to be fully compatible with man's organism.

Palliative care is an understood social emergency. It must be added that the study of pain control by means other than oeudema causing medication like morphine is likewise urgently needed. Pain killers that do not exhibit the lethal side effects of morphine are apparently already available and should receive special attention as should all other method which does not diminish the physical or at least mental autonomy of human beings. Years ago, I had suggested the control of the pain signals traveling to the brain by exogenous electrodes and other devices. The great American comic actor Jerry Lewis, through his own route, seem to have a lot to teach us in this respect.(see his performance a few months ago in the French TV show Tout le monde en parle)  

The present deleterious tendency is to ''restructure'' all health infrastructures, especially hospitals . Without the euphemistic parlance this amounts to reducing the number of hospital beds available and closing other facilities. As we have seen, this is largely explained by a pseudo-economic logic of efficiency related to micro-economics. However, a residual rational lies in the exploding costs associated with the newest medical equipment, especially the newest machines which cannot yet benefit in their production from the economies of  scale nor from mature product costing advantages. However, if this probably means a higher territorial specialization as a trade-off for better care, it certainly needs not mean the closure of the heath infrastructures which do not all require a full panoply of the latest, most performing equipment. In any case this territorial specialization should probably be tied with the generalization of helicopters as emergency vehicles in order to maintain the minimum response time over possible greater distances for all emergency cases in non major rural areas. Intervention teams would however need to consider all the issues related to access in urban or rural settings. (however, today's helicopters can land in the small areas covered by an ordinary vehicle as long as  it is located in an open space. Stretchers could in any case be fitted with electrical motors. In mountainous areas, this option might soon prove necessary.)  

Public hygiene and prevention is taken for granted even though its contribution to human longevity (as noted by Jean Fourastié, for instance) is of tremendous magnitude. The present trend toward the privatization of public services has demonstrably put public safety norms in jeopardy, including when they concern sensitive domains such as drinking water. Unless this Nietzschean privatizing and deregulating fad is reversed, this will become worst. To it will dramatically be added the consequences of the introduction in the environment (food, housing, industrial products etc) of the genetically modified organisms desired by private firms, as well as the introduction of exogenous molecules and additives and new processes such as the irradiation of food, whose safety for humans and animals alike is not adequately and impartially assessed. Aside form the medical personnel, farmers and firefighters intimately know the increasing seriousness of these trends. This need to be taken seriously as a duty towards mankind as a whole.

Finally, in my priority list, I would include the creation of pluridisciplinary research units funded by the State. This would complement the 35 hours and early retirement philosophy necessarily associated with an egalitarian society continuously developing its micro and macro-economic productivity. These units would work hands in hands with universities and research institutes and would allow for the maintaining of the research activity of retired professors and doctors who would thus continue to receive appropriate specific research funds, unless they chose to remain honorary members of their former research units. Above all, these units would allow for the formation of students who would choose this route. These research units, eminently compatible with the generalization of a shorter work week and early retirement, would mainly focus on all the domains abandoned by the main research units and laboratories. The impact of these units on the translation of research into practical processes and products has a great potential. At the same time, the pluridisciplinary aspect tied with the accumulated knowledge of the professional specialization of the persons concerned would have a beneficial "decentrating" (Piaget) potential, at least on the younger minds. In a way, this would also represent an accelerated manner in which the intelligentsia could pay back to the community the privilege of status it enjoys.

 

Of course, this is not an exhaustive, detailed list. My main concern is to illustrate the alternative approach based on ''social surplus value'' and the rational use of it by society. Some comrades are still apparently mesmerized by the bourgeois micro-economic ''rationality'': they fail to distinguish between the inherent aspects associated with the ''investigation method'' andthose associated with the ''exposition method'';  they thus fail to understand why Marx necessarily started his analysis of capital by the ''merchandise'' and the productive processes necessary to do produce it. These include absolute and relative surplus value as well as ''productivity'' within the ''immediate production process''. Following Marx's Simple and Enlarged Reproduction logic I have added what I called social surplus valueas the dominant form of extraction of surplus value which emerges under capitalism but flourishes under socialism, i.e under a mode of production consciously controlled by the collectivity. Yet, Marx also spend a great deal of time to demonstrate that this ''immediate production process'', if you want the scientifically elucidated microeconomic field, cannot be comprehended without integrating it into the overall equations of Simple and Enlarged Reproduction , or if you will, macro-economy in a static or dynamic setting. This would necessarily include the specific insertion in a World Economy displaying various modes of production and certainly various forms of capitalism (epochs), all of them placed under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production (Ch. Palloix, P.P Rey etc). Today the capitalist logic overdetermining the insertion in the Capitalist World Economy has gained a renewed dominance because of the disappearance of the socialist bloc and its socialist international division of labour made possible thanks to the almost complete delinkingof the USSR. Unfortunately, today's remaining communist countries cannot afford to ''delink'' entirely from this dominant mode given China's loss of orientation in the past years. But, as Cuba demonstrates, they could still effectively preserve their economic and political independence through an authentic socialist management of their international trade despite the embargo!

Some comrades are thus not  able to internalize such concepts as ''social surplus value'' or ''global net revenues''. They wrongly place some strategically vital activities in the poorly understood and undifferentiated basket called ''unproductive labour'', unproductive being then understood in liberal and certainly not Marxist terms. In so doing, they remain the sheepish slaves of bourgeois economics and methodology. Moreover, they then wittingly or unwittingly contribute to the generalization of bourgeois logic among the proletariat and their representatives. Ironically, contrary to Nietzschean casts, these would nevertheless be the last to demand social reforms which they would (fallaciously) deem to be unscientific and unsustainable! Despite the blindness, they are still accountable to their conscience and their membership. Thus, in a Bruegelian fashion, the one-eyed, wrapped into the voluntary lackey's elaborate embroideries, leads the blind into a common catastrophe. Once cannot understand the dynamic of the Public Health sector by starting with the category of productive units (hospitals, for instance) or ''needs(i.e health demandwhich needs to be met). What was said above explains why this is so. You cannot possibly hope to reach a reproductive rationality (general equilibrium) if you start from Menger's, von Mises's and their followers ''calculus of joys and pains!! From the start, this was a rather useless injection of psychology within an approach that still did pretend to belong to classical ''political economy'', because these feelings do not constitute original empirical data (even in a Baconian form), but are instead shaped by the prevalent mode of production and the epochs it sustains, as is superficially demonstrated everyday by the capitalist use of publicity and its impact on naturally preexisting effective demand. The same goes  for the neoliberal refrain which uses a cast-biased right to die with dignitywhile it raises the retirement age and sharply cuts access to public health services! (No doubt that neoliberal think-tanks have already priced this rightin a fashion which might cause Hobbes to inquire anew:What is the worth of a man?. Today's shameless Nietzscheans publicly speak of dignitywhile privately replacing Hoobes's concept of manby the dual conception of rabble and overman, an interesting pathological symptom in itself!  

 

Similarly, culture cannot be understood in these same bourgeois terms as I think to have shown in my three heuristic models painted with a wide brush in my Notes sur la Lettre à tous ceux qui aiment l'école'' (see the International Political Economy section in my site http://lacommune1871.tripod.com )

 

Whatever the case may be, the practical consequences of the extension of neoliberal economic categories to public sectors can now be verified. For instance, many Americans buy generic drugs in Canada through the mail or by organizing specifically designed shopping trips across the border (around 40 millions US citizens do not have health insurance and many middle class members who do not qualify for either Medicaid or Medicare prefer to do withoutand take a change with personal bankruptcy rather than contribute to a ruinous private insurance scheme.). The UK provides another clearcut demonstration with its neoliberal, New Labour conception of hospitals as health manufacturing unitsmanaged by archaic Taylorian CEOs working in tandem with New Economy CFOs : the reality here is that a public system which once was a precursor is now dependent on the TGV and the Tunnel under the Channel in order to alleviate its disastrous shortcomings! The same situation prevails, for exactly the same reasons, for UK public utilities and railroads. Other European countries are nevertheless rapidly following suit. And the sober negotiators of the proposed constitutional treaty apparently liked was they saw!

 

One last quick note is in order: ''public policy'' , the worthy ancestor of ''governance'', accompanied the first phase of the implementation of the neoliberal agenda. Not surprisingly, one of its fads was to track ''productivity'', ie the ultimate economic efficiency, in the unionized public services sectors. Were public servants sleeping with one or both eyes, in the opinion of these union-bashing servile crews? Restructuration was the order of the day and all of it was not explained by the introduction of new equipment such as computers in the workplace. Despite Laffer's laughable exercise, the real idea was rather to reduce all public spending other than the subventions going directly to the private sector. Indeed, public spending in the form of military spending went up dramatically. In the end, the lowering of the deficit hence debt ratio to GDP was due more to the long term lowering of interest rates (after the October 1985 Plaza Accord) than to fiscal responsibility (sic!) although the neocons did manage to operate a huge transfer of resources from the social services to the military and, in general, to the high-tech military-industrial complex. The main idea, in short, was to slowly but inexorably dismantle the Welfare State and its organized associated pressure and union groups, particularly at the central federal level. But, restructuring and privatization aside, how do you measure the ''productivity'' of public employees ? Perhaps by the length of the waiting list of customers. Taylorism or post-Taylorian adaptation of the division of labour and its management as objective methods are but the generalization of Adam Smith's pin factoryanalysis, one subsequently developed by Proudhon and scientifically established by Marx. There is no harm in using them with the democratic input of the workers, as long as everyone understand their ontological limitation as micro-economic tools (think of the concept of socially useful workin the framework of an efficient effective demand policyas opposed to a supply-side policy) The father of the « trained gorilla » vision did use his chronometer rationally but with a very openly censitarian conception of democracy playing itself out in a rugged pre-Keynesian unregulated form of capitalism, as is immediately apparent from his own personal writing. These human resources management techniques will never tell you, for example, how many elementary teachers or geriatric personnel you need according to demographic, educational and human evolutions. Nor anything of this sort. In the end the efficiency, even in the restricted sense of economic ''productivity'', is necessarily a macro-economic and social reality. To say otherwise, as neoliberal do, amounts to praising the growing antidemocratic inequality among citizens based on an increased and fraudulent tapping of labour wages by capital. As patently proven by the present Nietzschean evolution favoring security over liberty on a domestic and international scale, this trend is antithetical to the preservation of democracy. Including in the form of advanced bourgeois democracy.

 

 

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