The following Entry is the completed revised copy of SMP Compendium Entry “Political-Economic and Currency Unions.” I made various important changes related to ensuring greater clarity and better comprehension, both of which were lacking in the original Entry from the First Edition of The Work-Standard. The real challenge that I had with this Entry was the problem of preserving national sovereignty and not being properly informed about there has been a growing trend after 1945 to have countries form continental unions where they surrender much of their political and economic clout to a supranational body.
As established earlier in the SMP Compendium, the Socialist Nation’s geographical location is impacted by whether it is situated in the Western world (“developed country”) or outside the Western world (“developing country”). The details of the Work-Standard are broad enough to envisage a variety of different geographical locales and different ways of living by recognizing the multiplicities of different ways of economic life on Earth. What matters is whether its government is consciously willing to adopt the Work-Standard and restructure the political, economic and financial realms through revolutionization instead of reformation. Nations already under Socialism will have an easier time to make the necessary restructuring adjustments insofar as the Work-Standard opposes market reforms. Those market reforms are based on Liberal Capitalist concepts, philosophies, methodologies, and policies. None of the historical and existing Socialist regimes would have adopted the reforms if they had been operating on a Socialist Monetary Policy (SMP).
The Work-Standard will no doubt alter applications of Technology and how people interface with them in their everyday lives. When the Mode of Production shifts from Production for Profit/Utility to Production for Dasein, the Work-Standard will then be in the position of allow for the existences of Council Democracy and the VCS Economy. Its methods require specific artforms and applications cognizant of the ways of Arbeit-into-Geld and Geld-into-Arbeit, the Figure of the Arbeiter determined to help the nation readjust to the State of Total Mobilization.
Granted, the real challenge pertains to the issue of political-economic and currency “Unions” within the Western world. Both the EU/NATO and these United States are organized as Unions, regardless of whether the Liberal Capitalists in the West will acknowledge this or not. Unions like the American Union or the European Union have their own legal jurisprudence which are binding on all of its members. But unlike the EU/NATO, which is essentially an elaborate Free Trade Agreement (FTA), America is a Nation bound by a unitary national identity as a “Perpetual Union,” forged from the cauldron of the American Revolutionary War. It is difficult to envisage a European nation fully adopting the Work-Standard and still be a member-state of the EU/NATO.
European central governments lack the necessary political clout to fully adopt the Work-Standard. Most are still overdependent on the European Central Bank (ECB), which issues the Euro and oversees the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II). The ERM II, meanwhile, is meant for member-states who have been allowed to continue issuing their own national currencies under the EU/NATO. Also, all national economies in the EU/NATO must conform to the EU policies which are geared toward Market/Mixed Economies in order to facilitate the Common Market as part of the EU/NATO’s status as an elaborate FTA. That issue also is related to the Schengen Agreement preventing the member-states from being able to control their own borders.
Therefore, if any European nation decides to leave the Eurozone and the Schengen Area, they will regain Sovereignty over its Financial Regime and can adopt the Work-Standard with the power to conduct its own Real Trade Agreements. Abandoning NATO will allow the European nation to regain Sovereignty over its Armed Forces.
The US is a different issue altogether due to its longer history and the opposing visions of America from Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism. The Federal Government, specifically Congress, has the power under the US Constitution to allow for the implementation of the Work-Standard. Unfortunately, there is no interest in Congress for anything as unconventional as the Work-Standard, given its Hamiltonian tendencies. The implications clash with the Jeffersonians and the Democratic-Republican Party; it matters very little if they are Democrats or Republicans.
US History has demonstrated that when the Hamiltonians in the Federalist Party were in power, they advocated for the centralization of the American Union. The need to turn the American Union into a Federalist American Union was as justifiable then as it is now; it was only the Jeffersonians who wanted the Union to create an Empire of Liberty and impose it on all of humanity. It was they who wanted the Union to leave Latin America weak, divided and dependent on the US. Alexander Hamilton rejected that fate for Latin America, an obscure historical footnote within American history. What Hamilton wanted for Latin America was a similar Union to call its own, which would have been the case if Simon Bolivar had realized it in the late 18th century. Another Union in the Americas has the potential for the continent to be able to sustain itself and act as an ally as well as a counterbalance for the US and anyone outside the Americas. The power struggles that Latin America waged against the US over the centuries in Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and Argentina are a reaction to the excesses of American hegemony.
The question regarding Latin America from a Hamiltonian Federalist perspective has been about the issue of the “Monroe Doctrine,” which came into being in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson’s other protégé, James Monroe. Theodore Roosevelt could have rejected the Monroe Doctrine, but he insisted that he had to tolerate it out of geopolitical expedience when he added his own “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. He argued that American hegemony in Latin America was necessary in order to prevent the European colonialists at the turn of the 20th century, who were then preparing for the later confrontation in World War I, from exerting their own hegemony in Latin America. It also was part of the same motivation behind Roosevelt justifying the consolidation of American economic power there through the construction of the Panama Canal. His cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was more interested in furthering the Empire of Liberty which Woodrow Wilson never succeeded when World War I.
Even so, the Roosevelt Corollary still has the potential for the possibility of another doctrine favorable to Hamiltonian Federalism and all of Latin America in particular. The possibility is there for a new doctrine to serve as the antithesis to the Monroe Doctrine by having a Latin American Union of nations led by a powerful counterweight to the US. It is only appropriate for a “Bolivarian Federalist Socialism” to be that counterweight.
Any instability in one half of the Americas will eventually affect the other half because of the geography on this part of the world. It has always been the case, even in spite of the Monroe Doctrine and the realization of the Empire of Liberty in the 1945 and its later height of power in 1991. If the American people can give up Jeffersonianism and think more like a Hamiltonian, there will always be opportunities for them to help Latin America find the peace, stability and prosperity that they rightfully deserve. The US-Mexico Border can become just as peaceful as the US-Canada Border once the Americas have abandoned the Monroe Doctrine in favor of a different consensus.
Furthermore, this Latin American Union will need to preserve the Sovereignties of Latin America’s countries as a Federal Union of States, an alliance centered around the mutual interests of its own half of the Americas. That is what separates itself from these United States: the Totalities of Latin America have historically defined themselves as being separate independent nations. Meanwhile, if one was to envisage the breakup of the US, there would be a Pan-Americanism that will eventually develop and begin agitating for an eventual reestablishment of these United States because its dissolution was simply unjustified.
This brings us to the significance of the Socialist Nation and its own foreign policy stances on Currency Unions and Political-Economic Unions. Besides the Real Trade Agreement (RTA), Real Economic Zone (RTZ), and Real Trade Partnership (RTP), its Council State will find the former necessary and reject the latter. The Socialist Nation would only need to create a Currency Union” of various Sociable Currencies to rally all friendly countries around the Work-Standard, this Currency Union determined to overcome the Post-Bretton Woods Debt-Standard and, Empire of Liberty, and the Death of Bretton Woods. It is an international system of alliances poised to further the Currency Union’s eventual establishment of the World State Organization (WSO) and its own World Reserve Currency as part of a multipolar Socialist world order. The Socialist Nation shall refrain from establishing a Political-Economic Union because doing so risks compromising its own national sovereignty. The WSO on its own is not a Political-Economic Union.
Categories: Compendium
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