On the Question of the EU

Trade Blocs, Class Struggle, and the Case for Socialist Internationalism

1 | Introduction: Trade Blocs Seen Through a Class Lens

Few things look more technocratic than a trade‑bloc treaty. Glossy brochures speak of “harmonised standards,” “access to markets,” and “friction‑free supply chains.” Yet—from the Zollverein of the 1830s to the EU, NAFTA/USMCA, and CPTPP today—such pacts have always been political weapons wielded in a global class war. They re‑draw the map of who can sell, who can move, and ultimately who accumulates and who is disciplined.

“Economic integration involves agreements among nations to reduce or eliminate trade barriers … [Its] costs and benefits are never distributed evenly.”

— Investopedia, “Economic Integration”

Marxists therefore start with three questions, not with flags:

1. Who gains? Which capitals secure new markets, cheaper labour, or looser regulations?

2. Who loses? Which segments of the working class see their bargaining power squeezed or their jobs relocated?

3. How can labour organise on this terrain? Does the arrangement widen or narrow the front of struggle?

Trade blocs as instruments of capital

Mainstream economics frames blocs as “win‑win efficiencies.” But, as even orthodox textbooks concede, they are “free‑trade areas or customs unions” created to tilt competition in favour of member‑state firms. NAFTA let US agribusiness flood Mexico with subsidised corn; the EU lets German auto‑capital build Pan‑European supply chains; CPTPP gives Pacific investors a dispute court outside any national jurisdiction.

Such blocs emerge when capital needs scale: larger labour pools, harmonised product rules, and bigger consumer markets. The price, for labour, is exposure to cross‑border wage competition and supranational rules that can over‑rule domestic social policy. That is why every treaty contains its own backlash—from French farmers in the EU to US steelworkers under NAFTA.

Yet trade blocs also socialise the working class

Paradoxically, the very structures built for profit can socialise workers across borders. By 1905 German and Belgian miners were striking in concert along the Ruhr; by the 1970s Italian and Dutch dockers could throttle Common‑Market shipping. Today Amazon warehouse walk‑outs jump from Coventry to Poznań in days. As Marx wrote of free trade in 1848, it “pushes the antagonism between bourgeois and proletarian to its extreme point,” making capitalist power visible and, crucially, collectively contestable.

The free movement of labor is essential for international working-class solidarity and struggle. Marx and Engels argued that workers’ organizations must become international to effectively challenge capital, which itself operates across borders. The single market, such as the EU, does facilitate the movement of workers between member states, allowing them to seek employment and, in principle, join or form unions in their new country without the need for visas. However, Marxists would caution that while legal frameworks may enable movement, real obstacles remain—such as language barriers, precarious contracts, and employer strategies to divide workers along national lines—which can undermine effective solidarity and organization.

Marxists have long advocated for international coordination of workers’ struggles, recognizing that capital’s transnational nature requires a transnational response. In theory, the single market’s removal of barriers to labor and capital should make it easier for unions to coordinate actions such as strikes across borders, targeting supply chains that stretch from places like Liverpool to Łódź. Marx himself saw the need for unions to act as “centres of organisation” conducting struggles internationally. In practice, however, such coordination is rare and challenging. Differences in national labor laws, union structures, and political contexts often hinder synchronized action, even within integrated markets. Employers and governments frequently exploit these divisions to weaken cross-border solidarity.

The existence of supranational legal mechanisms—such as the European Court of Justice—does provide workers and unions with imperfect tools to challenge anti-union practices by governments. These institutions are limited and reflect the contradictions of capitalism: while they may offer avenues for redress, they ultimately exist to stabilize and legitimize the capitalist system rather than fundamentally empower workers. Nonetheless, Marxists would recognize that such tools can be used tactically, even if they are not a substitute for mass, organized struggle.

Trade blocs, then, are not neutral gadgets to be cheered or booed. They are battlefields. A bloc that tightens austerity (the Eurozone’s fiscal compact) may deserve working‑class opposition; a bloc that grants mobility and common bargaining norms may offer room to organise. Which weighs heavier is a concrete, empirical question—to be answered with wage data, strike trends, migration flows, and profit rates, not with patriotic sentiment.

The rest of this article applies that lens to the European Union, Brexit, and the prospects for re‑engagement—always asking Marx’s own question: does a given configuration strip away illusions, sharpen class lines, and help workers unite?

2 | Marx’s Benchmark – “On the Question of Free Trade” (1848)

To evaluate trade blocs through a Marxist lens, it is essential to ground our analysis in Marx’s own foundational text on the matter: his speech “On the Question of Free Trade” delivered in Brussels, 1848. Often overshadowed by the Communist Manifesto, this lesser-known work lays out a dialectical method of understanding capitalist integration—not through moralising for or against trade, but by assessing how trade accelerates the contradictions of capitalism.

“Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection. One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.

Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free trade competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

— Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1848)

Marx’s position: Neither celebration nor nostalgia

At the height of the 19th-century free-trade debate between British liberals and continental protectionists, Marx took a distinct stance. He refused both camps. For Marx, free trade is not “progress” in the liberal sense, nor is protectionism a solution. Instead, both are strategies used by national capitals at different stages of development.

Free trade, Marx argued, intensifies capitalist development by expanding markets and forcing less productive firms and nations to adapt or collapse. But this is not a linear march of human improvement—it is “progress by catastrophe.” As cheap British goods devastated Indian handloom weavers, or American cotton displaced Egyptian agriculture, Marx saw how capital sought to reorganise global labour to its own advantage.

“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade”

— Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1848)

Thus, Marx did not critique free trade because it undermines “national sovereignty” (a bourgeois concern), but because it transforms and deepens class exploitation—creating a global reserve army of labour, reducing workers to cost components, and strengthening the coercive discipline of capital.

Trade as class war by economic means

The core insight of the 1848 speech is this: free trade is not neutral. It is not simply about lowering tariffs; it is about remaking class relations on an international scale. Every trade regime—free or protected—creates winners and losers, and these are not always neatly national. Often, the working classes of all countries involved lose together, while transnational capital consolidates gains.

In this way, Marx prefigures what later thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey would explore more systematically: that capitalist accumulation needs spatial expansion to solve its internal crises. Trade, especially under bloc-based integration, becomes a mechanism for this expansion—driving down wages here, opening up investment flows there, and using institutional rules to entrench capital’s dominance across borders.

The dialectic: exposure breeds solidarity

Yet—and this is Marx’s dialectical brilliance—the same free trade that immiserates workers also connects them. It exposes the universal nature of their condition. The Lancashire spinner and the Calcutta dyer become entangled in the same logic of surplus extraction. The world market, though created by capital, opens the space for proletarian internationalism.

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” 

— Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Here lies Marx’s strategic wager: by stripping away local illusions and throwing workers into shared conditions, global trade—especially in bloc form—could actually lay the groundwork for class-conscious organisation on a world scale. This was not a prophecy but a possibility—a conditional outcome requiring political work and organisation.

Marx’s legacy for today’s blocs

When applied to today’s trade blocs—be it the EU, ASEAN, or USMCA—Marx’s method still holds. Rather than asking if blocs are “good” or “bad,” we must ask:

• Do they advance or undermine class solidarity?

• Do they empower workers to organise transnationally, or do they deepen their fragmentation?

• Do they transfer power to unaccountable capital-friendly courts (like ISDS tribunals), or do they enable shared regulation and resistance?

These are not rhetorical questions—they demand concrete historical study, statistical analysis, and attention to labour movements. But the 1848 speech gives us a starting compass: always examine trade through the antagonism between labour and capital, not the flags under which either side marches.

As the next section shows, few cases illustrate this antagonism—and its political fallout—more starkly than the European Union and the UK’s tortured relation to it.

3 | What the EU Really Is

The European Union is often cloaked in the language of peace, integration, and shared prosperity. It is portrayed in mainstream discourse as a unique political experiment: a post-national, post-war community that replaced the horrors of the 20th century with cooperation, diplomacy, and unity. However, to see the EU through a Marxist lens is to peel away the ideological veneer and reveal the underlying class function of the institution. The EU is not simply a "community of nations"; it is a bloc of capitalist states organised to secure the interests of capital on a continental scale.

This analysis does not reduce the EU to a conspiracy or a singular purpose—it understands the EU dialectically: as a contradictory but structured ensemble of institutions that reproduce capitalist social relations under the guise of supranational governance.

From Coal and Steel to Capital Mobility

To grasp the EU’s real nature, we must return to its origins. The postwar European project did not begin with idealism—it began with coal and steel. The European Coal and Steel Community (1951), the EU’s ancestor, was not built to spread democracy, but to stabilise capitalist reconstruction after WWII, prevent class conflict, and suppress the possibility of socialist advance—particularly in Italy and France, where communist parties were strong.

As Perry Anderson observes in The New Old World (2009), the foundational logic of the EU was always elite-driven integration, where national capitalist classes sought to limit the influence of working-class politics and insulate economic management from democratic interference. The Treaty of Rome (1957) entrenched this with a core emphasis on market liberalisation—not political union or social rights.

Perry Anderson argues in The New Old World that the European Union’s fundamental design is not rooted in democracy, but rather in insulating key areas of economic governance from democratic accountability and popular pressures.

A constitutional order for capital

Today, the EU’s legal and institutional architecture functions as a kind of neoliberal constitutionalism. Its treaties, such as the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Lisbon Treaty (2009), enshrine four key freedoms: free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour. But these freedoms are not neutral—they are structural requirements for capital accumulation.

The European Central Bank (ECB), for example, operates without democratic oversight and has one mandate: price stability (i.e., low inflation), not full employment or social welfare. Its infamous role in the Greek debt crisis illustrates the point: faced with democratic rejection of austerity, the EU and ECB imposed economic punishment, prioritising bondholders over human need.

In Adults in the Room (2017), Yanis Varoufakis argues that the European Union, through the Troika—the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund—effectively undermined Greek national sovereignty by imposing austerity measures and economic policies that prioritized creditor interests over democratic decisions.

Far from a progressive international order, the EU behaves as a disciplinary device—a mechanism to constrain fiscal policy, suppress labour resistance, and impose structural reforms in favour of market flexibility. Its Stability and Growth Pact, with strict deficit limits, functions as a de facto ban on Keynesian policy at the national level.

The Eurozone: Locking in hierarchy

The introduction of the euro was the final act in turning the EU from a trading bloc into a monetary regime serving capital. Without fiscal union or common social protections, the euro has become a tool for German industrial and financial dominance, producing deep structural imbalances between core and peripheral economies.

Southern European states, unable to devalue their currency or implement independent stimulus, were locked into austerity cycles. Public services were slashed, wages suppressed, and unions weakened—not as a result of necessity, but by design. The euro, in this context, is class war by financial architecture.

Costas Lapavitsas argues in Profiting Without Producing (2013) that austerity is not simply an economic necessity, but a political strategy designed to reinforce neoliberalism and the power of finance, especially in times of crisis.

The EU and migration: labour mobility, not solidarity

While the EU guarantees the free movement of people, this freedom is primarily designed to supply flexible, mobile labour to capital, not to protect the rights of migrant workers. Migrants from Eastern Europe, in particular, have been drawn into low-wage, precarious work in Western Europe—often used to undercut local labour standards, divide working classes, and suppress wages.

Rhetorically, the EU defends freedom of movement; in practice, it allows the racialised stratification of labour. Migrants are welcomed when exploitable and deported when disposable—while Fortress Europe militarises its external borders, leading to thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean.

Étienne Balibar argues that the European Union has created a regime in which economic integration and the free movement of capital are prioritized, while increasingly restrictive and exclusionary policies are imposed on refugees and migrants.

Liberalism without democracy

The EU is not a federal state nor a democratic confederation. Its institutions—especially the European Commission and ECB—are unelected, unaccountable, and operate on consensus among elites. The European Parliament, while directly elected, lacks meaningful legislative initiative. This structural design ensures that popular will can be heard but not acted upon.

Referenda that challenge EU orthodoxy—such as in France (2005) or Greece (2015)—are either overridden or ignored. The message is clear: integration proceeds regardless of public dissent, and where necessary, technocracy trumps democracy.

The EU as a class project

So what is the EU really? It is:

• A transnational framework for capitalist accumulation

• A mechanism for disciplining labour and states

• A structure that privileges creditor interests over social welfare

• A juridical order that constitutionalises neoliberalism

• A bloc that integrates capital while fragmenting labour

This is not to say that the EU is unchanging or omnipotent. Contradictions abound. Working-class resistance, regional divergence, and geopolitical instability pose real challenges to the EU’s coherence. But any serious Marxist analysis must begin from the premise that the EU, as presently constituted, is a tool of class rule, not an experiment in post-capitalist cooperation.

As we turn next to the case of Brexit, we confront the problem of how such a bloc is contested—and whether exit offers liberation or simply shifts the terms of exploitation.

4 | Brexit Without the Slogans

The 2016 Brexit referendum was one of the most significant political events in modern British history, marking a rupture not only with the European Union, but also with the dominant narratives of British politics, sovereignty, and class identity. In the mainstream imagination, Brexit was reduced to a binary of “Leave” or “Remain,” each camp cloaked in its own set of slogans: “Take Back Control,” “Global Britain,” “Stronger In,” or “A People’s Vote.” But a Marxist analysis requires that we cut through the surface spectacle and ideological fog, examining Brexit not as a moral or technocratic issue, but as a concrete expression of class contradiction and capitalist crisis within the UK and Europe alike.

To understand Brexit without the slogans is to historicise it—to see it not as an anomaly or outburst of populist irrationality, but as the political crystallisation of structural antagonisms that had been building for decades under both British and EU neoliberalism.

Brexit as a Class Rebellion… Misarticulated

Much has been made of the fact that Brexit was supported disproportionately by older, rural, working-class voters, particularly in deindustrialised areas of the Midlands and North of England. Commentators often interpreted this as “nostalgia,” “xenophobia,” or a “reactionary backlash.” But beneath this contemptuous liberal framing lies a far more complex truth: for millions, Brexit functioned as a distorted vehicle for class anger.

After forty years of deindustrialisation, privatisation, and austerity—policies implemented by both Tory and Labour governments—working-class communities were hollowed out. The EU, despite its supposed protections for workers’ rights, was increasingly seen not as a shield, but as an enforcer of austerity, privatisation, and technocratic rule.

Lee Jones & Shahar Hameiri argue that, for many working-class Britons, the EU came to represent distant and unaccountable elites, remote forms of governance, and a context of declining social and economic opportunities.

The vote to Leave, then, should be understood not simply as a reaction to immigration or sovereignty, but as a misdirected expression of class antagonism, with no organised socialist force strong enough to articulate it coherently. The Left’s near-total retreat from the terrain of class politics meant that Farage and Johnson could channel real grievances into reactionary narratives of “globalism,” “wokeness,” or “Brussels bureaucracy.”

The Left and the Tragedy of Ambivalence

The failure of the British Left to formulate a coherent, internationalist critique of the EU was crucial. For decades, Labour oscillated between soft Euroscepticism and technocratic Remainism. By 2016, the Left had largely abandoned its earlier critiques of the EU as a capitalist club, with many on the centre-left portraying it as a bulwark against the “excesses” of neoliberalism—ignoring the EU’s own foundational neoliberalism.

This failure was crystallised in the position of Jeremy Corbyn, who was historically critical of the EU, but led a party ambiguously positioned during the referendum and fatally divided afterward. Corbyn’s attempt to maintain unity between the Labour Left and its liberal, Remain-voting base led to paralysis—and ultimately collapse.

In The Northern Question (2020), Tom Hazeldine argues that Labour’s failure to take a clear stance for or against the EU allowed both the nationalist right and the neoliberal centre to dominate the political landscape, particularly in the North of England.

A true Marxist strategy would have required a position of principled Lexit—not siding with reactionaries like Farage, but offering a clear class-based alternative: an exit from the EU on socialist terms, coupled with a vision of radical redistribution, industrial democracy, and international working-class solidarity. Such a position was never clearly advanced at scale.

Brexit and the Recomposition of Capital

While popular commentary focused on the cultural divide between “Leavers” and “Remainers,” what was often overlooked was that capital itself was divided. Key sectors of British finance and multinational capital backed Remain, fearing the loss of market access and regulatory uniformity. In contrast, more nationally-oriented capital factions—real estate, hedge funds, extractive industries—backed Leave, seeing in Brexit a chance to escape EU regulations and pursue a deregulated, Singapore-style economy.

James Meadway (former economic adviser to John McDonnell) has argued that Brexit was less a straightforward revolt against neoliberalism and more a struggle over the future direction of the UK’s economic model, with competing forces seeking to shape the post-neoliberal order.

This inter-capitalist fracture reflects a deeper instability within global capitalism itself. The EU’s rigid framework of market rule clashed with the need for flexibility and political manoeuvre within the UK. Brexit, in this sense, was a recomposition of capitalist strategy, not its undoing.

Brexit’s False Promises and Material Outcomes

The nationalist right promised Brexit as a return to sovereignty, economic rebirth, and control over borders. In reality, it delivered a further entrenchment of capitalist hierarchy. Trade deals now favour multinational agribusiness, environmental standards have been weakened, and the UK’s immigration system remains exploitative—just redesigned in more bureaucratic terms.

Meanwhile, the structural causes of working-class discontent—wage stagnation, housing inequality, underfunded services—remain unaddressed, or have worsened. Brexit, far from reversing neoliberalism, has been instrumentalised by the Tories to push it even further, outside the constraints of EU law.

The “freedom” won by the Brexit vote, then, was not freedom for the working class—but freedom for capital to continue accumulation in new and more exploitative ways.

Slogans or Strategy? What Brexit Teaches the Left

Brexit was a moment of profound political opportunity—squandered. It showed that popular discontent with the neoliberal order is real, but that without a strong, organised, internationalist Left, that discontent will be captured by reactionary forces. A Marxist approach does not mourn the EU as a lost paradise, nor celebrate Brexit as a nationalist triumph. Rather, it recognises in both the deep contradictions of capitalist integration and the necessity of building class-conscious movements capable of transcending both nationalist and technocratic dead-ends.

As Rosa Luxemburg once said, the choice is socialism or barbarism. Brexit revealed that barbarism comes not only in jackboots, but in suits and campaign slogans, wearing the mask of democracy while entrenching capital’s rule.

What the Left must ask is: next time a rupture opens, will we be ready? Or will we once again watch history unfold without the means to shape it?

5 | Why Hard-Line Brexiteers Hate Starmer’s 2025 “Reset”

In 2025, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is proposing a recalibration of the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the European Union—a so-called “reset.” The plan, while carefully avoiding the language of rejoining the EU or even the Single Market, gestures toward regulatory alignment, increased cooperation on security, and modest friction reduction in trade. It is being marketed as a pragmatic, depoliticised course correction to “make Brexit work.” Yet, this ostensibly technocratic project has provoked a disproportionate reaction from hard-line Brexiteers, ranging from media vitriol to Tory backbench hysteria.

Why such fury over a seemingly centrist and measured proposal? The answer, from a Marxist perspective, lies not in the surface debates over “sovereignty” or “democracy,” but in what the hard right senses—correctly—lurks beneath Starmer’s “reset”: a potential unraveling of the ideological hegemony they constructed around Brexit, and a threat to the fragile class coalition they built to secure it.

Brexit Was Always About More Than Brussels

To understand the Brexiteers’ anxiety, we must recall that Brexit was never merely about policy or legal structures—it was an ideological project to reorganise the British state, economy, and national identity around a new regime of capital accumulation. The nationalist right used Brexit to forge a post-Thatcherite political economy: deregulated, offshore, and authoritarian in tone, appealing to an imagined “ordinary people” while enacting tax cuts for capital and constraints on dissent.

In that context, Starmer’s reset is seen as an incipient counter-project, however limited and cautious its form. To the Brexiteers, it risks re-legitimising the political rationality of EU-style social democracy: regulation, multilateralism, technocracy, and compromise. Even if Starmer’s version lacks ambition, it opens the door to reversing the “shock doctrine” that Brexit enabled.

Richard Seymour argues that Brexit was not merely about leaving the EU, but signaled a break with the postwar consensus and the emergence of a new political project combining nationalism with neoliberal economic policies.

Starmer’s pivot, therefore, represents not just a threat to policy, but to ideology—and by extension, to the class alliances and state transformations that hard-line Brexiteers fought to secure.

The Realignment They Fear: Capital Tilts Toward Labour

The intensity of right-wing opposition also reveals something deeper: sections of British capital are moving on. With global supply chains disrupted, economic stagnation persisting, and the EU and US forging new industrial policy paradigms, many business leaders no longer view post-Brexit deregulation as viable. Starmer’s Labour, with its emphasis on “stability,” is increasingly seen as a safer manager of capitalism.

What horrifies the Tory right is that Starmer is rebuilding the legitimacy of technocratic capitalism, thereby threatening the populist, nationalist alignment they painstakingly constructed. For years, the Brexiteers cultivated an alliance between asset-rich capital (especially in finance and real estate) and downwardly mobile segments of the working class and petty bourgeoisie. This alliance was held together by a politics of cultural grievance, border fetishism, and performative sovereignty.

If Labour can reconstruct a pro-EU-lite capitalist bloc while disarming working-class anger through a return to managerial politics, the Brexiteers risk losing their popular base and financial backers alike.

In her recent speeches and writings, Grace Blakeley often critiques the idea that a Labour government under Keir Starmer would fundamentally challenge neoliberalism, instead suggesting that Labour might simply manage or stabilize it in a more competent fashion. For example, she has argued that the “problem was never that the state was too small or too big... the problem was and is an imbalance of power between people and elites”. She argues that the political establishment’s real fear is not that Labour will introduce socialism, but that it could restore stability and legitimacy to neoliberalism by making it more governable.

Sovereignty as a Commodity, Not a Principle

Brexiteers continue to frame their opposition to Labour’s reset in the language of “sovereignty.” But as Marxists understand, such appeals are not neutral—they are ideological constructs used to mediate class relations. In the post-Brexit era, “sovereignty” became a commodity in the political marketplace, deployed to mystify the reality that capital—particularly transnational capital—remains the true sovereign.

Starmer’s reset, though far from a socialist proposal, threatens to demystify the Brexiteer narrative, exposing that “taking back control” did little to empower ordinary people, and much to empower hedge funds, landlords, and corporate cronies.

The New Socialist and other left commentators have argued that the right’s advocacy of sovereignty during Brexit was less about expanding democracy and more about granting greater autonomy to capital, using national independence as a cover.

In this light, Starmer’s attempt to re-regulate the economy and re-engage with European institutions—however modestly—is not just a policy challenge to the Brexiteers. It is an ideological threat to their mythology of sovereignty as liberation.

Limits and Opportunities for the Left

It is important, however, not to overstate the radicalism of Starmer’s project. His reset is fundamentally a bourgeois project of repair, not transformation. It aims to stabilise capitalism and restore the legitimacy of the political class. There is no vision of worker power, international solidarity, or democratic economic planning. In fact, Starmer has gone out of his way to purge the Labour left and reassure capital that his Labour is safe, obedient, and reliable.

Yet the political turbulence his reset generates is revealing. It shows that the Brexit order is not secure, and that the right remains vulnerable. If the Left can analyse these fractures clearly, it may find openings—if not in Starmer’s policies, then in the contradictions they expose.

What’s needed is a radical alternative to both Brexit nationalism and EU technocracy: a vision of internationalism grounded in working-class power, democratic control of production, and ecological transition. Starmer won’t deliver that. But the ferocity of right-wing backlash to his modest reset shows that even small moves can destabilise the ideological edifice of Brexit.

Conclusion: Class Struggle Beneath the Reset

Ultimately, the hostility of hard-line Brexiteers to Starmer’s 2025 reset cannot be understood in isolation from class struggle. Their project was never about liberating Britain—it was about restructuring class power in Britain, using Brexit as the battering ram. Starmer, unwittingly or not, is challenging part of that structure. And so the backlash is not just strategic—it is existential.

In this moment, Marxists must reject both nostalgia for the EU and illusions in Starmer’s centrism. But we must also recognise the importance of ideological terrain, and the cracks now emerging in the Brexit consensus. The fight is not over. In fact, the struggle to define what comes “after Brexit” has only just begun.

6 | Would Marx Back Re-entry?

The question of whether Karl Marx would support the United Kingdom’s re-entry into the European Union—either fully or through incremental steps—may seem anachronistic. After all, the modern EU is a complex neoliberal polity of supranational governance far removed from the 19th-century customs unions and trade regimes that Marx critiqued. Yet, when reframed dialectically and strategically—as Marx himself would have done—the question becomes more meaningful: Not “Would Marx endorse the EU?” in the abstract, but “Would Marx support re-entry as a tactic within the broader struggle for working-class emancipation?” The answer, as this section argues, is very likely yes—if the material conditions and class dynamics aligned accordingly.

Marx’s Method: Not Moralism, But Historical Materialism

Before speculating on Marx’s tactical choices, it is essential to recall his method. Marx did not evaluate political options by appealing to timeless moral principles or idealistic visions of purity. He judged political questions by their relationship to the real, material struggles of the working class, within a specific historical conjuncture.

As he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Thus, Marx was not an absolutist about international institutions or national borders. He was, above all, a strategist of class struggle. When he supported or opposed trade liberalisation (as seen in his 1848 Speech on the Question of Free Trade), it was not because he idealised “free markets” or opposed protectionism per se, but because he believed that certain conditions could sharpen contradictions, expose capitalist dynamics, and open space for working-class organisation.

If applied to the question of EU re-entry, this approach demands that we ask: Would rejoining the EU strengthen or weaken the position of organised labour, progressive politics, and transnational solidarity? Would it make socialism more or less achievable within our moment?

Re-entry as Tactical Class Composition

From a Marxist perspective, the EU is not a neutral arbiter of peace and cooperation, nor is it a monolithic force of neoliberal oppression. It is a contradictory terrain, structured by capitalist class interests but also shaped by the balance of forces within and across its member states. It has been used to impose austerity (Greece, 2015), but it has also embedded important social protections and labour standards that the British ruling class has long sought to dismantle.

Therefore, re-entry would not mean endorsing the EU’s current institutional configuration. It would be a tactical intervention into the terrain of struggle, shaped by two central considerations:

1. The domestic consequences of isolation: Since Brexit, the UK’s ruling class has embarked on a process of regulatory divergence, state shrinkage, and worker suppression. The attack on migrant rights, environmental standards, and organised labour has intensified. Re-entry could reverse some of these trends—not as an end in itself, but as a platform from which to rebuild working-class power in Britain.

2. The internationalisation of class struggle: Marx was a consistent advocate for working-class internationalism. As early as the founding of the First International (1864), he understood that capital operates transnationally—and so must labour. The EU, despite its limits, still constitutes an arena where struggles over labour rights, climate policy, and economic coordination take place across borders.

Marx would likely see strategic engagement with such a terrain as more fruitful than retreating into nationalist autarky.

“I have become more and more convinced — and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class — that they will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801, and replacing it by an independent federative bond. This is to be done not as a matter of sympathy with the Irish, but as a necessity based on the interests of the English proletariat.” 

— Karl Marx, Letter to Kugelmann (1869)

This statement, though specific to his time, underscores a principle: national isolation serves capital. Internationalism serves labour.

Against the Myth of the “Left Brexit”

Some socialists have argued that the EU is an irredeemably neoliberal structure that must be opposed outright—a “bosses’ club” designed to enforce free-market orthodoxy. This was the basis of many “Lexit” (left exit) arguments prior to and after 2016. While not wholly incorrect, this line of critique often confuses critique with abstention, and structure with stasis.

Marx, however, was acutely aware that even institutions designed by the bourgeoisie can become sites of contradiction. As he explained in The German Ideology, capitalist society creates its own gravediggers—even within its own institutions.

Moreover, “Lexit” underestimated the reactionary political bloc that would benefit most from Brexit: the alliance of asset owners, hedge fund managers, landlords, and border nationalists. It also failed to reckon with the vacuum that national withdrawal would create—a vacuum that the authoritarian right filled with devastating speed.

Therefore, a tactical Marxist position would not be to treat the EU as sacrosanct or wholly progressive, but to analyse whether operating within it might give workers and socialists more leverage than being outside of it. As of 2025, the answer to that question increasingly appears to be yes.

Internationalism, Not Institutionalism

It is important to stress that re-entry into the EU cannot be the end goal for any Marxist politics. Rejoining must not be confused with re-legitimising the liberal capitalist order, nor with a return to technocratic normality. The true objective remains: building a Europe of the workers, not the markets.

If Marx would back re-entry, it would be in the name of reclaiming the internationalist terrain, reconnecting the British left to its continental counterparts, and weakening the hold of nationalist ideology over the working class. He would demand that re-entry be paired with:

• The rebuilding of trade unions and tenant movements.

• The assertion of climate justice and worker-led green transition policies.

• Democratic struggles to reshape EU governance from below.

Marx would not advocate for a return to the Brussels status quo, but for international class struggle to erupt inside its halls.

“... the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule; 

That the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor – that is, the source of life – lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence; 

That the economical emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means; 

That all efforts aiming at the great end hitherto failed from the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labor in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries; 

That the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries; 

That the present revival of the working classes in the most industrious countries of Europe, while it raises a new hope, gives solemn warning against a relapse into the old errors, and calls for the immediate combination of the still disconnected movements; 

For these reasons – The International Working Men's Association has been founded. 

It declares: 

That all societies and individuals adhering to it will acknowledge truth, justice, and morality as the basis of their conduct toward each other and toward all men, without regard to color, creed, or nationality; 

That it acknowledges no rights without duties, no duties without rights...”

— First International Rules, 1864

Conclusion: Re-entry as a Means, Not an End

In sum, if we are to channel Marx’s analytical spirit rather than mummify his conclusions, we must abandon the question “Is the EU good or bad?” and instead ask: “What terrain of struggle is most favourable for working-class internationalism and socialist transformation?”

In today’s world, with climate catastrophe looming and capital more transnational than ever, isolationism is not revolutionary—it is a gift to reaction. Marx would likely support re-entry—NOT out of affection for European bureaucracy, but as a tactic to subvert the nationalist project of Brexit, to realign class forces, and to help rebuild the international workers’ movement.

In this way, the question is not whether Marx would support the EU, but whether we are serious enough to fight for socialism even within enemy terrain.

7 | A Marxist Minimum Programme, Whichever Side of the Channel

As Brexit’s consequences continue to crystallize, and as calls for either closer alignment with or even re-entry into the European Union grow louder, the Marxist left faces a critical task: not simply to react to bourgeois integration or disintegration, but to proactively define a programme that articulates the minimum demands of the working class, grounded in internationalist solidarity, irrespective of national borders. Whether inside or outside the EU, the task remains the same: organise, agitate, and build class power.

This concluding section proposes a Marxist “minimum programme” that is not dictated by the immediate institutional form of Britain’s relationship to the EU, but rather seeks to unify workers across the Channel around common material interests. Drawing from classical Marxist theory, trade union demands, and contemporary political realities, it attempts to answer: What should we fight for now, as internationalists in a post-Brexit world?

1. Class Organisation as the Foundation

Any meaningful programme must begin with the revival and reorganisation of the working class as a class-for-itself, in Marx’s sense. In both Britain and Europe, decades of neoliberal assault have hollowed out unions, fragmented labour markets, and decoupled class identity from political representation.

As Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto (1848):

“The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.”

Rebuilding the infrastructure of struggle is not just a preparatory task—it is itself part of the programme. Therefore, any Marxist agenda must include:

• A renewed right to organise, including sectoral bargaining and the right to strike without legal intimidation.

• Pan-European trade union coordination, with solidarity funds, shared demands, and active participation in cross-border labour struggles.

• Support for rank-and-file organisation over bureaucratic labourism, including grassroots-led union democracy.

Without this, all political programmes will remain hollow abstractions. As Rosa Luxemburg emphasised, the working class must be not only the subject of change but the agent of revolution.

2. The Demolition of Fortress Europe and its Xenophobic Cousin, “Global Britain”

One of the sharpest divides between the liberal and Marxist left is their treatment of migration. For liberals, migrants are economic inputs or moral causes. For Marxists, they are fellow workers, divided by borders to maintain capitalist domination.

The EU’s internal market freedom of movement stands in contradiction with its external border regime—Frontex, detention centres, and violent pushbacks in the Mediterranean and Balkans. Brexit, meanwhile, replaced this with a racialised “points-based system” that reinforces nativism and precarity.

A Marxist minimum programme must therefore demand:

• Abolition of all immigration detention centres, in Britain and across the EU.

• Unfettered rights to move, settle, and work for all migrants, regardless of origin.

• Full and equal access to housing, healthcare, education, and public services.

• Active solidarity with migrant workers, not just inclusion in labour campaigns but leadership of them.

As Marx wrote in 1870 regarding the Irish question:

"Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps: English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. ... This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

Ending this antagonism must be central to our minimum programme.

3. A Green Just Transition – Owned by Workers, Directed by Needs

The climate crisis is not simply an environmental issue—it is the ultimate expression of capitalist contradiction, where endless accumulation threatens the very conditions of human life. Yet current “green” policies, whether within the EU’s Green Deal or the UK’s net-zero strategy, often rely on market incentives, greenwashing, and outsourcing emissions.

A Marxist programme must instead insist on:

• Public ownership of energy, transport, and key infrastructure, removing decarbonisation from market speculation.

• Worker-led transition plans that guarantee retraining, wage protection, and democratic control over the restructuring process.

• International cooperation on green technology, ending the patent regimes that hoard innovation for profit.

• An end to neocolonial resource extraction masked as green development—especially in the Global South.

As Marx stated in Capital, Volume III:

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”

The climate transition must be public, planned, and planetary.

4. Decommodification of Life – Housing, Health, and Work as Rights

The EU and UK alike are shaped by neoliberal principles that turn basic needs into market opportunities. Housing is financialised, healthcare is privatised, and welfare is stigmatised. This is not a matter of institutional design—it is the logic of capital itself.

Marx understood that real freedom begins where material need ends. Therefore, a minimum programme must push for the decommodification of life:

• Universal, publicly-owned healthcare, rejecting both NHS erosion and EU-wide “health markets”.

• Rent controls and mass public housing, with cross-border solidarity against landlord capital.

• A four-day working week with no loss of pay, enforced by union strength and legislation.

• Guaranteed unemployment benefits, sick pay, and parental leave, indexed to the cost of living.

As Engels noted in The Housing Question (1872):

“The housing shortage from which the workers and part of the petty bourgeoisie suffer in our modern big cities is one of the numerous smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-day capitalist mode of production.”

That logic must be broken.

5. Democratic Control – From Brussels to Westminster

The EU is rightly criticised for its democratic deficit: unelected commissioners, opaque rulemaking, and limited parliamentary oversight. But Brexit has not returned power to the people—it has centralised it further in the hands of an unaccountable British executive, shielded by first-past-the-post and Crown prerogatives.

A Marxist programme must therefore demand real democratic control over the economy and state, including:

• Abolition of undemocratic treaty constraints (e.g., budget deficit limits, state aid bans) in EU treaties.

• Expansion of participatory democracy, including worker representation in economic planning.

• A democratic republican constitution in the UK, with proportional representation, abolition of the House of Lords, and recallable MPs.

• Municipal socialism, giving cities and regions control over land, infrastructure, and services.

Democracy cannot be limited to parliaments—it must become a daily practice embedded in workplaces, schools, and communities.

6. Internationalist Political Strategy – Not Electoral Chauvinism

Finally, a minimum programme must move beyond the false choice between technocratic liberalism and populist nationalism. The left must craft a political project rooted in transnational class interests, capable of contesting elections without surrendering to electoralism.

This means:

• Building international alliances of socialist parties and movements, willing to challenge both EU rules and Tory demagoguery.

• Promoting a transnational socialist caucus in the European Parliament that prioritises workers’ rights over market discipline.

• Supporting grassroots insurgencies—like tenant strikes, school occupations, and workers’ assemblies—as the foundation of socialist renewal.

As Marx wrote in the Rules of the First International:

“The struggle for the emancipation of the working class means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.”

Conclusion: Strategy from Below, Across Borders

Whether Britain rejoins the EU, stays out, or charts some hybrid path, the Marxist left must reject the politics of reactive nationalism or naïve liberalism. Our north star must be internationalist class struggle, and our minimum programme must reflect the urgent needs of working people—housing, dignity, power, and survival.

What matters is not where we stand on the map of Europe, but where we stand in the line of battle between labour and capital. From Calais to Cardiff, from Athens to Aberdeen, the task remains:

Organise the working class. Seize democratic power. Transform the future.

8 | Conclusion: Internationalism or Isolation

As we reach the end of this Marxist exploration of trade blocs, Brexit, and class struggle, we confront a question that haunts not only the British left but the working classes across the capitalist world: Will we face the crisis of global capitalism with internationalism, or retreat into nationalist isolation? The answer to this question determines not only the direction of political strategy, but the very terrain on which workers fight for liberation.

To pose this as a binary—internationalism or isolation—is not to simplify, but to expose the real antagonism: between a political orientation that sees workers' fate as shared across borders, and one that sees national sovereignty as a shield from global capital. The former demands class organisation across nations. The latter, however radical in tone, ultimately reinforces the bourgeois state and mystifies the class nature of imperialist power.

This concluding section argues that, for Marxists, the answer must be unequivocal: isolation is not autonomy, and internationalism is not submission. Only through the former illusion has Brexit been weaponised by the right, and only through the latter confusion has the left sometimes surrendered to EU liberalism. We must chart a third path—a militant, socialist internationalism, uncompromising in its solidarity and ruthless in its critique.

1. Sovereignty vs. Solidarity: A False Dichotomy

Since 2016, many have framed Brexit in terms of a “sovereignty restored” narrative. But what kind of sovereignty are we talking about? For whom is it restored? In the hands of the working class, or of the ruling class?

The Marxist answer is clear: bourgeois sovereignty is not freedom, but a mechanism of class rule. Whether exercised by the European Commission or the British Parliament, state power under capitalism reflects the balance of class forces. As Rosa Luxemburg warned during debates in the Second International, "the national idea serves only to cloak class interests."

Marx himself never equated internationalism with capitulation. His support for Irish self-determination was not based on romantic nationalism, but on its strategic role in weakening British imperialism and advancing class unity across the isles. That distinction is crucial. Internationalism, for Marx, is not about denying national oppression—but about refusing to make a fetish of the nation-state.

Brexit has illustrated this contradiction vividly. The working class was told they would “take back control,” yet have found themselves more disempowered than ever—facing deregulation, union-busting, and economic precarity. This is not because of EU membership per se, but because political nationalism was substituted for class power.

2. The Limits of the Nation-State in the Age of Capital

The retreat to national borders offers no solution to global problems. Climate collapse, capital flight, financial crises, automation, and pandemics all exceed the limits of any single state apparatus. And while the state remains a terrain of class struggle, it is no longer the centre of capitalist reproduction—it is one node in a transnational system of accumulation.

This is precisely why Marx called for workers of the world to unite—not out of moral preference, but strategic necessity. In The Civil War in France (1871), reflecting on the Paris Commune, Marx stated:

“The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”

The same is true today. Reclaiming national parliaments without transforming transnational systems—trade, finance, production—merely delays the problem. It does not solve it.

This is also where the liberal left’s approach falters. In defending EU membership on the grounds of progressive regulation or economic rationality, they ignore the imperialist structure of the Union itself. It is possible—and necessary—to reject both the nationalist right and the neoliberal centre. That is the essence of revolutionary internationalism.

3. Lessons from the Brexit Era: Organisation, Not Slogans

The Brexit crisis revealed a key lesson: narratives alone do not empower workers—organisation does. The left was caught between competing elites: pro-EU technocrats defending austerity, and pro-Brexit nationalists promising false emancipation. Both sides offered slogans, not power.

Marxists must reject this impasse. Rather than choosing sides in bourgeois constitutional crises, we must build counter-power:

• In workplaces, through unionisation and strikes.

• In communities, through mutual aid and tenant unions.

• Across borders, through solidarity networks, migrant alliances, and international campaigns.

This is not a utopian aspiration. In logistics hubs, care economies, and digital platforms, workers are already finding common cause across national lines. These microcosms of internationalism must become the strategy of the whole.

4. From Defensive to Offensive Struggles

Much of the left's energy since 2016 has been reactive—defending regulations, rights, and norms under attack. While important, this orientation is defensive by nature. Internationalism must shift the terrain from defense to offense—from preserving the past to fighting for the future.

This means asserting a bold vision:

• Not just freedom of movement, but freedom from exploitation.

• Not just transnational cooperation, but transnational planning and redistribution.

• Not just legal parity, but democratic control over capital.

The history of the workers’ movement teaches us that internationalism is strongest when it is militant, not moderate. The First International, the Comintern, the anti-colonial left—all advanced internationalism as a form of confrontation, not compromise.

5. Toward a New Internationalism

To advance internationalism in the 21st century, the left must move beyond both nostalgia for social democracy and utopian post-nationalism. We must forge a new internationalism rooted in class, not treaties; in solidarity, not technocracy.

This requires:

• Rebuilding international workers' institutions—from radical trade union confederations to socialist party networks.

• Campaigning across borders on climate, housing, and wages, recognising that the enemy is not the foreign worker but the global boss.

• Educating cadres and communities in the history and necessity of internationalist struggle—from the Paris Commune to the Zapatistas to Palestine.

As Marx wrote in 1872, speaking at the Hague Congress of the First International:

“Citizens, let us think of the basic principle of the International: Solidarity. Only when we have established this life-giving principle on a sound basis among the numerous workers of all countries will we attain the great final goal which we have set ourselves. The revolution must be carried out with solidarity; this is the great lesson of the French Commune, which fell becaue none of the other centres -- Berlin, Madrid, etc. -- developed great revolutionary movements comparable to the mighty uprising of the Paris proletariat.”

Final Words: Isolation Is a Trap – Internationalism Is the Way Forward

National retreat is not revolution. Brexit has not liberated the working class—it has fragmented it. EU liberalism will NOT deliver socialism — it will contain and co-opt it. The only real path forward is through the patient, militant, collective construction of class internationalism.

That is the task before us now—not to rehash referendum lines, but to build new lines of struggle. From Dover to Dublin, from London to Lviv, the question is not whether to be in or out—but how to build power from below, across borders, against capital.

That is not just a conclusion. It is a beginning.