In the 1960's, the revolutionary Left, in Britain, refused to be drawn into backing one of two opposing bourgeois camps, in respect of the repeated attempts, by British governments, to join what was then the EEC (European Economic Community or Common Market), and which is now the EU. They adopted the stance that “In Or Out The Fight Goes On”, or, in other words, for the working-class, joining the EEC could not be the solution to their problems, as it was just as capitalist as Britain, and so the exploitation of their labour would still take place, as it would if Britain stayed out. But, the same argument applied in reverse. There was no reason to ally with British capitalists – particularly, the most backward sections of capital, i.e. the small capitals and petty bourgeoisie, who were the main opponents of membership – on the basis that, somehow, exploitation by “British” capital was preferable to European capital, i.e. some kind of “lesser-evil”. By the 1960's, that was, in any case, absurd, because a large part of “British” capital was, in fact, foreign capital, in the form of companies such as Ford, General Motors and, necessarily, also, European capitals, such as VW, Renault, Siemens and so on.
The only “British” capitals were those small, mostly privately owned firms, remnants of the private capital of the 19th century, often family owned businesses, and the dwarfish businesses of the petty-bourgeoisie. These are, as Engels noted, the most backward, the most viciously anti-working class sections of bourgeois society, precisely because their small size, and consequent inefficiency, means they can only survive by all kinds of petty means, and cheating that large-scale capital found to be counter-productive, even by the end of the 19th century. The only sections of “the Left” that advocated opposition to the EEC, were The Communist Party, and its fellow travellers within the Tribunite/Bennite wing of the Labour Party, just as, in the 1930's, the same Left reformist trend, around Nye Bevan, had supported Oswald Mosley's economic nationalism, set out in The Mosley Memorandum, which formed the basis of his economic plan, when he left Labour to set up the British Union of Fascists.
Why was that? In the 1920's, the policy of the USSR, under Stalin, which controlled the Communist International, and, thereby, the various national communist parties, was to ally with the peasantry, and petty-bourgeoisie. It was an abandonment of revolutionary politics, and a return to the ideas of Menshevism, of a two-stage transition towards socialism. It was most apparent in relation to the Chinese Revolution of 1927, when Stalin liquidated the Chinese Communist Party into the bourgeois nationalist KMT of Chiang Kai Shek. The policy disarmed, physically and ideologically, the Chinese workers and communists, leading to their slaughter by the KMT, in July 1927.
Part of the reason for that was that Stalin, and his regime, in the USSR, sought to pursue a policy of building Socialism In One Country, a thoroughly utopian and reactionary venture. In the hope that the USSR would be allowed to get on with that, he sought to assure imperialism that the USSR would not actively promote international socialist revolution, but would limit itself to supporting only bourgeois-democratic national revolutions. When that approach, inevitably, led to disaster, in China, Stalin and the Comintern, briefly, swung in the opposite direction, for around four years, during the Third Period, in which they refused to engage in any joint action with other parties, defining them all as some kind of “fascist”.
The consequence was that, in Germany, it enabled Hitler to come to power. Trotsky's criticism of the Stalinist position, in that regard, has been used by opportunists, and parliamentary cretins to justify the creation of popular fronts.
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