AFTER decades in which New Labour’s leaders emptied the word socialism of any radical or transformative meaning, it is a pleasurable change to find Labour politicians giving it pride of place in their political lexicon.

The call to rebuild Britain evokes positive feelings. Decades of neoliberal political and economic policies have destroyed a substantial part of Britain’s manufacturing industry and added to the drag on productive investment that the casino economy so favoured by the City entails.

And what socialist does not desire a transformation of Europe? 

This is a continent in which the capitalist verities of a neoliberal elite are built into the architecture; where internationally binding treaties make the “free” movement of capital, the labour that creates this capital, the goods and services that are produced and provided by that labour an unchallengeable orthodoxy.

Transformation is barely powerful enough a concept to convey the full extent of the changes that must be made if our Europe — created through the labour of generations and of its millions of workers — is to serve these millions and not their masters.

A transformed Europe must take account of the ways in which slavery and colonial exploitation laid the material foundations of its achievements.

Paradoxically Labour’s election manifesto last time round — the manifesto that recovered the millions of votes frittered away by the capital comfy governments of Blair and Brown — was a bit short on socialist rhetoric.

But it was strong on the kind of specific commitments that found a ready response among millions of working-class voters and very substantial number of less proletarian but equally exploited voters among a middle class that itself is losing some of the advantages which its marginal privileges traditionally bestowed upon it.

The strongest suit in Labour’s electoral hand was centred on reversing the decline of the nations and regions where millions of working people and their families live.

Labour was unashamed in making it clear to all who would listen that this entails a very big shift in resources and investment to the areas most afflicted by the neoliberal blight of the last decades.

Millions heard the message and thus the Tories and the Liberal Democrats were denied the opportunity to continue their infamous coalition while the Tories — the main party upon which our ruling class traditionally invests its hopes — were denied a clear parliamentary majority.

But Labour’s clear message was heard with equal clarity by Britain’s political elite, its Establishment of top civil servants, leading media personalities, military and intelligence circles, politicians, diplomats and trade emissaries, all of whom answer to the big bankers, the bosses of the biggest firms, the captains of industry and commerce and their global network of partners, and rivals, in exploitation.

Much of what has passed over recent months, most especially the political paralysis which Parliament has imposed on the actual process of leaving the EU and the stasis which has seen every one of its procedural manoeuvres fall in confusion, signifies a political crisis that cannot be resolved if the democratically expressed will of the majority is denied but, equally, cannot begin to be resolved except through an election.

The collapse of the Theresa May administration and the succession to the premiership of Boris Johnson are signs that the crisis of Britain’s political system is so profound as to render the Conservative Party, for the moment, an unreliable custodian of ruling-class interests.

This interregnum has been one of paradoxes. A parliamentary Tory Party — composed in its largest part of people who would rather respond to the dictates of the banks and big business than the opinions of their constituency party members — is obliged by the pressing necessity to curry local favour to back a Brexit policy they can barely tolerate.

One leader, herself a resolute Remainer found herself unable to find a way through this Alice in Wonderland of hypocrisy and has been succeeded by another early Remainer who has yet to prove himself adroit or unprincipled enough to find a way out of the rabbit hole.

On the other side of the Commons — divided down the middle in a parliamentary tradition which today is barely able to accommodate the divisions in every parliamentary party — is the Labour Party, itself beset by paradoxes.

It has as its almost unassailable leader someone whose long parliamentary career has seen him on the side of workers in struggle, oppressed people in revolt and as an unremitting critic of imperial war and the European Union.

Yet he is the leader of a parliamentary party that is composed in its majority of people for whom the word socialism has conveyed little of his intransigent morality and political consistency.

With the Tory Party currently out of step with the wishes of the ruling class and its poisonous mix of austerity and neoliberalism wildly unpopular, it is unlikely that a bid to keep Britain in the EU would be grounded in a steadfast defence of the public spending limits, constraints on state aid, strictly enforced market competition rules or the kind of forced privatisations and pension cuts that the Troika imposed on Greece.

If the Tories cannot be relied on to act in the interests of big business and the banks, then others must be pressed into service.

There is little expectation that the Liberal Democrats — who proved to be enthusiastic “austerians” in the coalition — are reliable enough. The party is weak and divided in Parliament with its membership confused and insufficiently committed to the austerity policies of its new leadership.

Into this confusion we thus have a minor constellation of groups competing to challenge the Labour Party’s approach to Brexit at the party’s September conference.

The newly formed Love Socialism group of MPs is backing a joint conference motion with Another Europe is Possible, Labour for a Socialist Europe and Open Labour.

Their motion calls on Labour to “campaign energetically for a public vote and to Remain” and to “defend free movement and extend migrants’ rights.”

Their motion talks about the need for “a radical social programme” along with “an internationalist drive to transform the EU.”

It dresses this core content with a rather abstract call to “attack poverty, insecurity and inequality; rebuild communities with public investment and ownership; boost wages and union rights; and combat the climate crisis.”

If we set aside the uncomfortable fact that among the dozens of Labour MPs and other luminaries associated with these initiatives there are many whose “socialist” values include support for a succession of imperial wars, privatisation and PFI and repeated assaults on Corbyn’s leadership, we are entitled to ask how the course of action they propose accords with the actual socialist policies to which Labour is committed.

The core of Labour’s strategy is a reversal of the privatisation drive which has seen public goods and services transformed into income streams for failing profiteers.

If Britain remains within the EU, can a Labour government bring back rail, telecom, post, water, electricity generation and distribution and gas back into public ownership?

Not likely. It is not that an obscure Brussels official will say no. British courts, staffed as we know by judges of absolute impartiality, would be obliged under our treaty obligations to strike down any measure that would breach the supranational “right” of any corporation to enter into competition for the provision of these services.

Of course, in the absence of a national monopoly in the provision of the services, a publicly owned enterprise is quite permitted to compete on these quintessentially capitalist terms.

If we subject Labour’s other core objectives to the test of whether the EU regulatory framework — which is now incorporated into our political and legal structures — would permit them we come up similar problems. State aid to industry, for example, is not specifically forbidden but it has to be limited in scope and duration and is subject to oversight and revocation by the European Commission.

The other plank upon which the “left-wing” advocates of Remain stand is a commitment to transform the EU.

How realistic are our chances of doing so in a direction which extends public ownership, limits the operation of capitalist markets, imposes barriers to the export of capital and promotes its compulsory investment in the domestic economies of member states?

It is here that the otherwise powerless European Parliament has a smidgen of power.

Providing, and only providing that the European Council, representing all the EU’s member states, was unanimously in favour of a revision of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and that the Commission were to bring forward such a measure to suspend the constraints on socialist nationalisation, the members of the European Parliament then have the right to agree or reject the measure. Phew!

Thus the prospect of a socialist transformation of the EU hinges on finding unanimous agreement among the national governments, a progressive and binding majority in the Council and Commission and a majority in the European Parliament.

With all these balls lined up we just need a guarantee that the European Court of Justice would not snooker such a measure as being incompatible with the four capitalist freedoms — the “free” movement of capital, of labour, of goods and of services.

Of course, if this farrago of fantasy makes it to the floor of the Labour Party conference its proposers will be invited to demonstrate how they intend to overcome these obstacles. Indeed, we can invite them to do so now in the run-up to the conference.

But in the absence of convincing answers to these questions we are entitled to conclude that the steps towards “socialism” they envisage do not include state aid to industry or the restoration of natural publicly owned monopolies in the provision of public services.

Of course this is not the limit to the obstacles EU membership presents to a radical labour government. There is a whole raft of problems associated with the ECJ rulings on employment rights, there is the problem of mechanisms the EU has in place to monitor and sanction public expenditure and there is the nature of the EU’s relationship with Nato.

As one wit put it, all in all, an armed insurrection to establish the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat looks a more likely road to working-class power and socialism than anything that involves tangling with a European Union, defended, as it is, by the barriers to radical transformative action that its treaties and structures have in place.