The European Nightmare

Utopian Socialism and the Wolf-Killer

Utopian Socialism posits that the people are not enlightened enough to know what it is they need. Thus, enlightened technocrats must reshape society in order to shift their behavior, re-educating them so that they’ll finally believe the right things.

Though there have been no farmer protests in Luxembourg this year, grocery stores have had empty shelves several times on account of protests in France and Belgium.

Dougald Hine

’s (and excellent) essay about a realistic response to the food policy problems here in Europe, as well as the excellent essay he linked to by

Gunnar Rundgren

, inspired me finally to write something about how the EU works and what what the political landscape looks like here, especially for my non-European readers. I highly suggest you also read both of those essays if you’d like to know about the specifics of the farming protests. This essay is instead a broader look at the way the EU’s utopian socialist management policies affect everyday life and limit the political options for resistance to capitalism.

Despite living here for now more than eight years, I rarely write about European politics. No doubt some of that is because I don’t really “feel” European, all the while also not feeling American any longer. Another part of this is my language ability. My German’s passable, but not nearly good enough to read German news without recourse to a dictionary. I’m only proficient in English and to a lesser extent French, meaning I have to rely heavily on translations of articles for anything outside of Luxembourg, France, and Belgium, and of course Europe is much more than those three countries.

Also, honestly — European politics can be quite baffling, especially when it comes to keeping track of the multiple political parties in each country. For instance, tiny Luxembourg has seven political parties with members in the parliament, and another four with no current sitting members. After almost four decades of only knowing a system where two major political parties conspire with each other to ensure no viable third party alternative, it’s really a steep learning curve to keep track of the political views of eleven in just one country.

Making it more difficult is that none of the major political parties in any European country maps well onto the political parties in the US or the UK. In other words, you cannot ever say with any accuracy, “x party is the equivalent of the Republican party” or “y party is a bit like the Tories.” In fact, often times, positions which appear to be “left” or “right” in the United States or the United Kingdom are often staked out by parties who consider themselves to be the opposite tendency. For instance, many of the anti-government positions that one associates with right-libertarian parties in the US were held strongly by “far left” parties here, a point seen quite starkly in the matter of Covid lock-downs and forced vaccine injections. While “left” political formations in the US drooled enthusiastically over these increases in government power, “far left” parties — especially communist ones — in Europe held positions much closer to right-libertarians in the US.

Not only do European parties not translate well across the Atlantic, they also don’t translate well across borders here. It’s not really possible, for instance, to say that the ADR (the “far right” nationalist party in Luxembourg) is similar to the AfD (the “far right” nationalist party in Germany), even though they sometimes hold similar positions. Likewise, the positions held by the Greens and variants of Die Linke (a left unity party) vary from country to country.

In fact, the only parties that do translate well across borders are the center-liberal (or neoliberal) parties, such at the DP in Luxembourg, the SPD in Germany, and Macron’s Renaissance party. But, what makes those parties quite similar to each other is a position they also share with many center-right parties: a pro-European Union stance.

And that’s where European politics starts to get quite confusing, since there’s always a second political terrain upon which each party operates.

Long before I knew any better, I often imagined the European Union as one of the most hopeful social experiments humans have ever come up with. This was, of course, before I actually lived here and understood anything about the absurd technocratic fantasies which animate it. Eurosceptic politicians and thinkers in Europe tend to describe the EU as “socialist,” a label which quite annoyed me for several years until I understood the truth to it. That’s not to say the EU is leftist or Marxist by any means; rather, it’s utopian socialist.

I’ve previously referred to the differences between utopian socialism and Marxist socialism, including in my recent essay about polyamory, but it’s probably worth explaining what divides these two socialisms more explicitly.

Utopian Socialism starts from the premise that human inequality, political strife, economic disparities, and all other societal problems are management problems. In order to stop theft and other property crimes, for example, what’s needed are better laws, more education, and programmatic societal changes that make people understand that crime isn’t something they should do. It’s the same logic that’s behind DEI and critical race theory policies in the United States: teach children about racism at an early age, change laws and economic policies to be more lenient on and more advantageous to racial minorities, and propagate top-down narratives about racial justice, and eventually racial disparity will disappear. The push to introduce Butlerian gender conceptions into early education comes from the same logic: teach young kids that gender is a matter of declaration, not the body, and eventually society will hold this as a core truth. In other words, much of what is considered “progressive,” “liberal,” and even “leftist” in the United States is accurately described as utopian socialist.

Marxist Socialism, or more accurately Communism, starts from a completely different premise. Rather than believing better management is the solution to societal problems, it proposes that a radical change in economic relationships must happen before any of these other problems can even be addressed. For instance, no amount of education would stop the poor from stealing from each other and also from the rich. Instead, making it possible that the poor can provide for themselves — and have full control over the work they do towards those ends — would make property crime a lot less useful of a tactic for them. Similarly, since the core root of racial tension is unequal access to wealth — and because racial divisions arose to create and maintain this unequal access in the first place —, only an end of the class system which concentrates wealth in a few hands could end those tensions. No amount of (re-)education, preferential hiring, or moralistic browbeating would actually fix the problem, and it’s all anyway quite insulting to everyone.

The really absurd policies of the European Union are most definitely not communist in any sense of the term. They’re utopian socialist. They all operate under the premise that problems can be managed out of the populations it governs, whether or not those populations agree to this management or not.

To see what this looks like, consider the many proposals that are part of the EU’s environmental policies to reach “climate neutrality” in the next few decades. The common theme you find in most of them is an attempt to change individual behaviors through top-down management policies and laws that penalize undesirable actions and reward desired ones.

For instance, to reduce the extra energy use involved in living in a house rather than an apartment, the EU has proposed urging member states to penalize individuals and older couples whose children have moved out who live in homes with more than one bedroom. This policy is essentially a repeat of the UK’s absurd ‘bedroom tax,’ in which people with spare bedrooms living in public housing get reduced housing benefits and increased rent.

My husband and I have a spare bedroom, which is also my office. Under the EU’s proposal, Luxembourg would be forced to penalize us for this extravagance, either by making us pay an extra tax or through a more complicated proposal involving individual allotments of tradable carbon credits. In that system, each person would be allowed a maximum expenditure of carbon per year (including for travel, etc). Having an extra bedroom would eat into those credits, meaning we’d have to cut our carbon elsewhere (eating less meat, not traveling, not driving, etc). In either scenario, the stated goal behind all of this is to reduce climate change by using incentives and penalties to make individuals act in a certain way.

Besides being quite dystopian, there are a few points really begging to be considered here. First of all, keep in mind the parallel with the UK’s bedroom tax, which was a policy pushed through by a conservative government as an austerity measure. Rather than spending money to build more public housing, the government decided to punish those already in public housing by forcing them either to downsize to smaller apartments or to leave public housing altogether.

The bedroom tax punishes the already-poor by threatening them with more poverty, while doing nothing to actually change the conditions which lead them to need public housing. This is exactly what the EU policy does as well, except it does so not in the name of austerity and conservatism but “saving the planet.” In any system they’d implement, the wealthy would still be able to maintain their wealth. In the tax-penalty scenario, they’ll just happily pay the tax; in the carbon allowance scenario, they’ll just buy unused credits from the poor.

Also, the fact that a conservative policy from the UK re-appears in a “liberal” policy of the EU isn’t as strange as it seems, since utopian socialism isn’t actually an anti-capitalist framework. In fact, utopian socialism, especially in its US social justice identitarian iterations, positions itself as a way to make capitalism better. DEI and other identity-based programs aren’t interested in changing class relations, only class composition. The ultimate goal of social justice identitarianism is a truly diverse upper-class that fully reflects the racial and gender composition of society as a whole. When 13.6% of all bankers, mortgage brokers, politicians, prison guards, and police officers are black, capitalism will finally be diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

The other point to make about this strange repetition of conservative austerity policies is that utopian socialism imposes a morality upon society in the very same way that conservative Christians do. The ultimate goal of policies such at the Bedroom Tax, as well as all the varied conservative policies to penalize single mothers, the unemployed, and other undesirable groups is to coerce them into changing their behaviors. These are all policies aimed at making life very difficult for those who do not conform to certain moral standards.

The same is absolutely true of the EU’s environmental policies. Even if the moral framework appears to be different from conservative Christian morality, they’re both trying to force people into behaviors deemed morally acceptable. In the end, is there really any difference between pushing people to eat less meat for environmental reasons and pushing them to eat less meat because it’s Lent? Or telling the poor they should make do with less because Christ was also poor or because the planet is warming?

When you look at the EU from this perspective, it gets a lot easier to understand what’s happening with all the farmer protests. The farmers have varied concerns, absolutely, but in every case, the problems they are protesting against were caused by utopian socialist EU policies. And they have every reason to be angry, especially when they are constantly smeared as far right climate deniers or worse.

For a taste of the kind of condescension they face for their complaints, consider this statement from an “environmental activist” published by a major Pro-EU think tank:

Ultimately, protecting European democracy requires a resolute stand against the far right and its alliance with aggravated farmers. Only by prioritising climate action can Europe hope to safeguard its values and protect itself from the insidious influence of far-right ideologies, which thrive on misinformation, hatred and a blatant disregard for the environmental challenges that endanger us all.

The matter of this “far right alliance” deserves particular attention. First of all, it’s a deeply unfair characterization, since the farmers have been getting sympathy from all parts of the political spectrum except the neoliberal center. Anyway, what is really meant by “far right” in many such statements is Eurosceptic, which includes also far left politicians such as Jean-Luc Mélanchon in France and Sarah Wagenknect in Germany. As was completely missed by most outside observers about Brexit, there’s always been a far-left opposition to the EU. Unfortunately, just as communist opposition to the EU’s heavy-handed control of movement and bodies during Covid was re-narrated as fascist, communist opposition to the EU is re-narrated as far-right.

That same is true on the matter of Russia and Ukraine. Both far-right and far-left parties (and remember, in many countries there are multiple versions of each tendency) have been vocally anti-NATO and anti-interventionist in the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Right now in Germany, both the far right and the far left argue against providing more military aid (especially the Taurus cruise missile systems) to Ukraine. They both accurately warn that Ukraine will use those missiles to attack Russian territory (that’s specifically why Zelensky wants them), and that Russia will see such an attack as a direct European entry into the conflict.

On this matter, Ukraine is actually a primary reason why farmers in Poland were protesting. The EU made a deal with Ukraine to allow extremely cheap imports of wheat into Europe, imports which primarily flooded into Poland. This means Polish wheat farmers are in danger of losing their farms due to debt, making them bear the cost of the EU and NATO’s desire to weaken Russia.

The EU and individual member states have all taken a belligerent stance on the matter of Ukraine. Current EU president (and wolf-killer) Ursula von der Leyen —who is technically “center right” — has already stated she will refuse to work with any politicians who oppose her own position on Russia, calling them “friends of Putin.” Every other government has taken similar positions, even though only 10% of Europeans actually think a Ukrainian victory is possible. The EU seems utterly intent on making sure the war continues, no matter what the people they claim to represent actually want or believe is possible.

Again, though, these positions are features of utopian socialism, which is why it’s so common to see US social justice identitarians parroting the very same lines about Putin’s evils coming from the mouths of EU politicians. In fact, you tend to see this same mirroring throughout almost every policy position with one important exception: the matter of Palestine. This might be the only place the US and UK social justice identitarians diverge from the utopian socialism of the EU, a matter that can only really be explained by remembering that opposition to Zionism has always been first of all a communist position. US and UK communists (including minority-oriented communist groups like the Black Panther party) criticized Israeli apartheid long before identity-based political groups superseded them, and Utopian Socialism¹ hasn’t been able to eradicate these positions there yet.

The really difficult situation here in Europe is that any opposition to EU management schemes and policies is immediately narrated as far-right “populism”, even if it’s coming from far-left/communist political movements. This re-narration doesn’t just come from EU leaders, but also a rather complicated network of non-profits and foundations which position themselves in advisory roles to EU government bodies. Some of these are fully funded directly by the EU itself, such as the website EUvsDisInfo, a propaganda arm of the EU diplomatic service which constantly pays for Facebook and Twitter ads to push their articles on users in Europe (that’s how I found out about them).

Quite a few of the foundations also received funding from George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation, which abruptly announced last August that it would greatly cut its funding for these networks of non-profits. Others, such as the Center for European Populism Studies, either don’t disclose their funding publicly or instead post dead links to required annual reports. And one thing a majority of these “independent” organizations have in common are addresses in Brussels, Belgium, since that’s the heart of EU governance.

EU elections are coming up soon, by the way, and something you hear repeatedly mentioned by these foundations and think tanks is that the EU is under existential threat from populism. This has led to an almost hilarious attempt to soften some of the more extreme edges of the EU’s utopian socialist projects. Even Ursula von der Leyen, who is running again for EU president, has “mysteriously” made some of her previous policies disappear, deleting entire platform statements without explanation or acknowledgment of these changes.

The reason she’s doing this should be quite obvious. Euroscepticism— in both its far right and far left variants — is a common theme in these elections. Sure, it probably sounds a bit strange that anti-EU political parties would run for EU elections, but such a tactic is the only way to undermine the stranglehold the EU has over individual countries. And people have a lot of reasons to be angry with her. Not just the disastrous farming policies and the energy crisis caused by her pro-war stance, but also her leadership under Covid. Especially, the recent revelations that, under her direction, every EU country got locked into exorbitant covid vaccine contracts (totally so far 4 billion euros in unused vaccines alone) have caused quite a furor. In fact, it turns out that the wolf-killer had exchanged personal messages with the CEO of Pfizer before the punitive contracts were approved, and it gets worse:

Alexander Fanta, a Brussels reporter at Netzpolitik, put in an "access to documents" request after reading the New York Times story. The Commission said it couldn't find the texts…

Of course, this is all absolutely in keeping with the elitist management ethic of utopian socialism. The proles are too stupid to know what’s best for them. Sure, it might seem like they have reason to be angry that their leaders forced them to buy things they didn’t want or need, but since they’re too stupid to know what’s good and what’s bad, it’s best they don’t get any say in the matter.

In fact, this is precisely what happened to the only real left-populist resistance to the EU in the last two decades in Europe, SYRIZA. Greeks — both left and right — had overwhelmingly voted in a far left political party who promised to resist the EU’s economic punishments for countries who didn’t cut social benefits. In return, the full weight of the EU came down on the Greeks, forcing SYRIZA into a choice: leave the EU, or betray the Greeks. Sure, the leaders of the party were cowards, but it’s impossible to overstate the threat of a forced exit from the EU. The same would happen to any other EU nation who dares to challenge the utopian socialist technocrats.

In this way, the European Union constantly limits political resistance to its policies by punishing member states who listen to their people. To say this is all ultimately un-democratic isn’t really stating much at all, since this is anyway how Liberal Democracy has always worked. Any popular resistance to its “democratic” institutions is immediately re-narrated as anti-democratic, though the smears used more frequently now are “populist” and “far right.”

Unfortunately, yes: some of that resistance is indeed part of “far right” political formations. But the problem here should be obvious by now. Far left — especially communist — resistance is usually crushed quite quickly, leading people to embrace the only other political formations also offering resistance. In many cases, those “far right” parties have taken up some of the communist positions and repackaged them in more Christian identitarian forms, and those who vote for these parties are often swallowing their disgust for such aesthetics because no one else is even trying to speak for them.

This is a deadlock that won’t end any time soon, and it’s hard not to suspect that the EU actually prefers to have the far right as a foil, rather than the far left. Parties like the AfD are easier to attack as “Nazi” or “fascist,” and such accusations quickly mobilize the rest of the populace against them. It’s much harder to smear a far left party as “communist,” since that’s anyway what they actually are and they don’t hide these leanings. Thus, in order to undermine it, popular far left resistance needs to be renarrated as far-right, which is what the EU does time and time again.

1. And actually, Zionism itself relies heavily on Utopian Socialism. The “left wing” kibbutzim movement wasn’t a communist movement, but rather a utopian socialist one.