Classes and individuals in the European Union: Marxist and cosmopolitan approaches

Tzanakopoulou, Maria (2025) Classes and individuals in the European Union: Marxist and cosmopolitan approaches. European Law Open , ISSN 2752-6135.

Abstract

The Marxist dialectical method places class struggle at the centre of historical developments. Class struggle necessitates conflicting collective subjects, which take the form of collective workers and collective capitalists. For reasons related to the span of EU competences and the historical maturation of the EU, no such collective subjects exist at EU level. The formation of an EU-wide working class is impeded by the anchoring of working interests in member states. Similarly, no full-fledged EU-wide capitalist class exists, as migrating individual capitals assimilate into the domestic (national) conditions of host member states. Nevertheless, the intervention of the EU into member states is one of internal penetration into domestic class struggles and not one of linear external association. The above findings are largely neglected by liberal cosmopolitanism which sees the EU as an example of Kantian cosmopolitan right, universal hospitality and eternal peace. The cosmopolitan reading is not corroborated by reality because it ignores the interactions between collective subjects and interpenetration of class struggles between member states and the EU. It focuses instead on individuals and states severed from a wider capitalist totality and understood as interacting in linear unidirectional ways characterised by externality. This weak understanding of the Union hinders the process of finding solutions to the problems that the EU and its citizens are faced with.

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