As this issue of our bulletin goes to press, no-one seems to believe that a Brexit agreement can possibly come out of this Wednesday's EU summit.
    And no wonder!  Not only is May demanding that the EU leaders should wholeheartedly agree to Britain's desertion.  She also wants them to do her own work - by taking the sting out of the overbidding which paralyses her government!
    By now, most of us have long ceased to make any sense of the Brexit saga, anyway.  The longer it keeps going, the more it exposes the lies which brought it about in the first place.
    Where has the Westminster Brexiteers' promise of a bright, affluent future for Britain gone by now?  All we can see is an endless list of bankrupt retailers leaving a long trail of wasted jobs behind, and a growing queue of car companies announcing job cuts, shut-downs and short-time working for now, as well as likely plant closures for tomorrow!
    For us, workers, Brexit only means more chaos in this already crisis-ridden capitalist system - for which the bosses already want us to foot the bill!

The madness of national borders

And all this chaos for what?  For the sake of placating the delusions of the Westminster Brexiteers - which is what May has been doing right from the minute she came into office.
    There is probably no better illustration of these delusions than the issue of the Northern Irish border which, we are told, is at the centre of the wrangles between May and the EU - but, above all, between May and her own ministers.
    It is now 97 years since, in 1921, the British capitalist class was finally forced by a popular uprising to leave Ireland.  It had treated it as a colony for centuries.  But instead of admitting defeat, they made a point of punishing the Irish people by carving out a slice of Ireland and keeping it within the so-called "United Kingdom" - one which was united at gunpoint, under the helm of a long irrelevant, but nevertheless parasitic monarchy.  Thus the Northern Irish border came into being, as a perverse symbol of British capital's pretence at imposing its imperial diktat on the rest of the world!
    Today, a century on, this border remains as incongruous as it always was.  Except that, by now, the world has become far more integrated than it was then.  National borders are no longer just obsolete, as they already were, they now constitute a straitjacket which paralyses the development of the economy and strangles human society.
    Yet, not only do the Westminster Brexiteers want to tighten up Britain's borders so as to be legally able to treat foreign workers as expendable slaves, but all British politicians insist on Northern Ireland remaining “British”.  When the most obvious and fairest solution to the Northern Irish border riddle is to return Northern Ireland to where it belongs - the Irish Republic!

The tasks ahead for the working class

The promoters of the Brexit project, whichever their party or faction, are just harking back to a long dead past - and trying to turn the clock of history backwards.
    But there is logic to their madness:  it is a by-product of this sick capitalist system and its on-going crisis.  Would xenophobic demagogues like Nigel Farage and the Tory Brexiteers have gained any credit otherwise?  If they did, it was only thanks to the despair generated by the growing underemployment, poverty and dereliction which followed the banking crisis.   In fact, this is the exact same process which has already allowed the racist far-right to raise its profile in so many countries across the world, from Brazil and America, to Hungary and Italy.
    Ever since Cameron's day, the Westminster Brexiteers have been striving to ride this wave of despair, in order to boost their prospects.  But if they have been able to indulge in this sort of politicking, it is only thanks to the hardship caused by this rotten capitalist system and the rapacious greed of its capitalist class.
    How many prime ministers have we heard in the past boasting that they would not only fight "crime" but also "the causes of crime"?  For them, it was just posturing, of course.  But today, it is high time the working class took upon itself the task to do it in earnest - but, this time, against the crimes of the capitalist order, the poverty and hardship it inflicts on the working class majority.  And, in this case, the "cause of crime" is none other than capitalism itself.
    We, workers, form the only class which produces all wealth without having anything to gain from capitalist profiteering.  This gives us a unique capability and a unique responsibility too - that of freeing society of this decaying capitalist system, once and for all and, by the same token, of all its by-products, including this Brexit mayhem!