Ten years ago, millions of people in Britain went to the polls to decide whether the country should remain in or leave the European Union.
The referendum was hailed as a historic democratic exercise, a choice that would supposedly determine the country's future. Workers were told they had only two options: remain in the EU to safeguard prosperity, democracy and stability, or leave to "take back control," restore national sovereignty and build a better future outside Brussels. In reality, they were offered no real choice at all.
That was indeed the real trap. Ten years later, history has delivered its verdict. Both promises have proved to be illusions.
Brexit did not liberate working people from exploitation, nor did it deliver the prosperity promised by its advocates. But neither have the last ten years rehabilitated the European Union. On the contrary, they have exposed even more clearly its true character—not a "union of peoples," but an imperialist interstate alliance serving the interests of European monopolies.
This is the lesson that matters—not whether one form of capitalist management proved more efficient than another, but whose interests were served all along.
The Brexit referendum was never a confrontation between the people and the establishment. It was, above all, a conflict between competing sections of the British bourgeoisie over the most effective strategy for defending their profits and strengthening Britain's position within an increasingly competitive capitalist world.
One section of British capital regarded continued participation in the EU's single market as the safest guarantee for its interests. Another believed those interests would be better served outside the Union, with greater freedom to negotiate trade agreements and pursue an independent economic strategy. Workers were mobilized not to defend their own interests, but to strengthen one bourgeois strategy against another.
From the very beginning, many communist forces rejected this false dilemma. The question was never whether British capitalism should be managed from Brussels or Westminster. It was whether the working class would subordinate itself to one or another section of the bourgeoisie, or develop its own independent political strategy.
Some on the Left continue to argue that Brexit represented a historic defeat for the British ruling class and therefore deserved communist support. It is certainly true that important sections of British capital strongly opposed withdrawal from the European Union and suffered political setbacks after the referendum. But this does not alter the class content of the process.
Not every defeat of one section of the bourgeoisie constitutes a victory for the working class. Capitalism is full of conflicts between competing capitalist interests. The decisive question is not whether one fraction of capital loses influence to another, but whether the working class emerges politically stronger, more organized and closer to challenging capitalist power. The experience of the past decade gives a clear answer. Brexit neither weakened the domination of the monopolies nor opened a path towards workers' power. Instead, it became another arena in which rival bourgeois forces competed to reshape British capitalism according to their own interests.
The referendum undoubtedly expressed genuine popular anger after decades of deindustrialization, austerity, privatizations and attacks on workers' rights. But popular discontent, by itself, does not automatically acquire a working-class political direction. Without an independent class strategy, legitimate social anger can be absorbed by competing bourgeois forces, diverted into nationalism or exploited by the far right—as subsequent developments in Britain have clearly demonstrated.
Britain left the European Union, but it did not leave capitalism. Nor did it cease to be an imperialist power. The monopolies remained firmly in control of the economy. Labour exploitation continued. Britain remained fully integrated into NATO, preserved its strategic alliance with the United States and continued to participate in the broader framework of imperialist rivalries and interventions. Governments changed, slogans changed, but the class character of the British state remained exactly the same.
Neither Brussels nor Westminster governs in the interests of workers. Both govern in the interests of capital. Nor has the European Union emerged vindicated.
Those who portrayed the EU as a guarantor of peace, democracy and social progress have seen their narrative steadily collapse. Over the past decade, the Union has accelerated its militarization, dramatically increased military spending, deepened its strategic integration with NATO and promoted policies designed to strengthen the competitiveness and profitability of European monopolies. At the same time, workers across Europe continue to face attacks on labour rights, privatizations, rising living costs and policies that subordinate social needs to capitalist profitability.
The myth of a "social Europe" has become harder than ever to sustain.
Yet another illusion has survived Brexit: the belief that national capitalist development, by itself, offers a progressive alternative. It does not. Capitalism outside the European Union remains capitalism. As long as economic power remains in the hands of monopolies, workers will continue to pay the price—whether decisions are taken in Brussels, London or any other national capital.
This is precisely where opportunism once again trapped working people inside a bourgeois dilemma. Some urged them to defend and "reform" the European Union into a supposedly democratic and social institution. Others wrapped capitalism in the national flag, claiming that Britain outside the EU would somehow become more prosperous, more democratic and more responsive to the people's needs. At the same time, far-right forces, with Nigel Farage at the forefront, exploited popular dissatisfaction by presenting nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric as an alternative to the European Union, while leaving untouched the very system that generates exploitation, inequality and imperialist wars. Different slogans, different political colours—but the same refusal to challenge the power of capital.
History repeatedly demonstrates that whenever the bourgeoisie defines the political dilemma, the working class is invited to choose only between different forms of its own exploitation.
Ten years after Brexit, the central contradiction remains exactly where it always was—not between Brussels and London, not between Leave and Remain, but between labour and capital.
For communists, the answer has therefore remained unchanged. Disengagement from the European Union can serve the interests of the people only when it forms part of a broader struggle for workers' power, the socialization of the means of production, central scientific planning and withdrawal from every imperialist alliance, including NATO. Outside this framework, replacing one model of capitalist management with another cannot abolish exploitation.
The tenth anniversary of Brexit should therefore not become another occasion for settling old scores between supporters of Leave and Remain. History has already exposed the limits of both strategies. Neither offered a genuine way forward for the working class because neither questioned who owns wealth, who exercises power and whose interests the state ultimately serves.
The real lesson of Brexit is not that Britain chose the wrong road. It is that workers will never find their own road by marching behind one section of the bourgeoisie against another. Their future does not lie in choosing between competing capitalist strategies, but in strengthening their own independent class struggle against the power of the monopolies, against imperialist unions and alliances, and for a society where political power and economic wealth belong to those who produce it.
Ten years after the referendum, the fundamental choice remains exactly the same as it was in 2016: not between Brussels and Westminster, not between Leave and Remain, but between the power of capital and the power of labour. That is why the only genuine alternative is neither a "better" European Union nor a "better" capitalism outside it, but the struggle for socialism.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.