For a Socialist United States of Europe

(Quote of the Week)

As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained, there can be no capitalist European superstate or any lasting agreements among the imperialist bourgeoisies, which are nationally based and inevitably come into conflict with each other in the drive for profits and new areas of exploitation. As shown by the financial crisis wracking the European Union, economic and political agreements among the imperialists, which are first and foremost aimed against the working class, are inherently unstable, portending renewed conflict among rival capitalist states. The only road to ending capitalism’s boom-bust economic cycles and its threat of new imperialist wars presaged by trade war is that of international proletarian revolution, which will lay the basis for transcending the outmoded nation-state through the construction of a world socialist economy.

From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.

Capital has become international and monopolist. The world has been carved up by a handful of Great Powers, i.e., powers successful in the great plunder and oppression of nations….

A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. A multi-millionaire cannot share the “national income” of a capitalist country with anyone otherwise than “in proportion to the capital invested” (with a bonus thrown in, so that the biggest capital may receive more than its share). Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and anarchy in production. To advocate a “just” division of income on such a basis is sheer Proudhonism, stupid philistinism. No division can be effected otherwise than in “proportion to strength,” and strength changes with the course of economic development…. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.

Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists…but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America, who have been badly done out of their share by the present partition of colonies, and the increase of whose might during the last fifty years has been immeasurably more rapid than that of backward and monarchist Europe, now turning senile.

—V.I. Lenin, “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” (August 1915)