Britain's second best known radical-socialist and successful writer, Tariq Ali, states that today's upsurge in Catalonia has deep, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist roots. (See Tariq's talk.)
Tariq's comments were made before the enormous pro-Spanish unity demonstrations across Spain and in Barcelona on 8 October. The police counted 350,000 'at least' in Barcelona. The organisers claimed 950,000. Barcelona is of course the capital of Catalonia.
Catalonia is home to 16% of the Spanish population. But it accounts for nearly 27% of Spain's exports, 19% of its GDP and nearly 21% of Spain's foreign investment. The Madrid government claims that Catalonia owes it 52 billion Euros. And it is money that makes the national political life of Spain go round. Spain has the dubious reputation as having the most corrupt political class in a very corrupt EU and Spain's PM, Mariano Rajoy Brey has the 'honour' of leading Spain's most corrupt party. (Only Spain's royalty has a larger proportion of corrupt members than are to be found in the leadership of the Peoples Party.) These are the people who sent the national police to injure 900 would-be voters in Catalonia's informal referendum on independence (October 1) and the people that used their influence (and considerable constitutional power) to sternly warn their subjects to mind their ways!
2.3 million Catalans voted on 1 October; 37% of the Catalan population. Tariq does not discuss in his talk the political implications of the limited numbers voting for Catalan's endorsement of independence from Spain. Instead he focuses on the consequences of independence. He rightly says that the EU will not support an independent Catalan. He adds that a separate Catalan could only stay in the EU if it supported the EU's economic policy (which nearly destroyed Spain and still means 25% youth unemployment) and NATO. But perhaps the Catalan political question starts at an earlier point in the argument than a discussion of the possible consequences of Catalan winning independence vis a vis its relations with the EU.
As with the Scottish example, Tariq agrees with many left commentators that the national upsurges in Europe are, in large part, a response to decades of misery as a result of Europe's own versions of globalisation. The fault lines in the body-politic are apparent in and across many European nations. The all derive from particular histories. In the Scottish case the democratic deficit causing decades of political oppression of the country and society by an 'unelected' Westminster government sparked the most recent rise of the SNP. The fault lines are cracking open to various degrees, almost all (exception made of Flanders in Belgium) as a means of resisting modern capitalism's impact by trying to create new and accessible states that will defend themselves.
The main parties in Spain, the Peoples Party and the Socialists, promote Spanish 'unity' and state violence if that unity is threatened. The biggest left party in Spain, Podemos, supports the right of the Catalans to have a referendum on independence but the Podemos leadership prefers a 'no' vote in that circumstance.
What are the fundamentals here?
We are not looking at the vast efforts of colonial nations to overthrow their metropolitan rulers and the lines that they drew to demarcate their different empires. The national upheavals in modern Europe are not aimed at the overthrow of an occupying empire; they are drawn from historical struggles but are aimed as an effort to break-away from political systems that are remote, corrupt and that do not protect them. As a result there is intense interest in these national campaigns about the alternative ways in which democracy might work. Part of the often positive attitude shown towards the EU is a reflection of the desire, particularly of the youth, to be less national, more global in outlook and more local in the distribution of power.
These upsurges have nowhere yet confronted capitalism's formidable architecture in the European, let alone the global arena. Part of Tariq's talk includes a clip showing a Spanish economist explaining his utopian vision of the economic strength of an independent Catalonia. Again, the assumption is that the EU would accept such a set up.
The result of a radical momentum, to by-pass, to go around, to jump over, to turn your back on a appalling centre of corrupt wealth and dogmatic power that is the Spanish state's politics, but without a realistic and radical sense of the future, is a split. On October 8, it was not middle class people banging their pots and pans who turned out for Spanish unity. Many of the speakers used all the old slogans about the need for unity to fight 'the enemy'. (Their version of unity is down among the old socialist party bureaucracies, the self-serving party mayors, the central offices; down among the lowest of common denominators.) But hundreds of thousands of Catalans were not serving the status quo in their actions.
Starting from political basics, Catalans; workers, professionals, youth and unemployed are not united over Catalan's independence as a sufficient answer to the woes that they share. They doubt the current Catalan leadership. They doubt that even if they were once removed from the Spanish political stink they would have found something new. The Catalan cause needs to look, not so much at the 37% of the voting population who voted for independence but how to unite, with answers, the 37% with the remaining 63%. Part of that is surely the defence of the right of Catalan people to do whatever they see as fit against their current system to change their lives. And that includes the creation of a second referendum for all. In that second debate comes the versions of the future which the people want to see - with a frank account of the real difficulties to be faced and the real allies that are needed to overcome those difficulties.
To lose the energy of October 1 by confronting it with October 8 will be to break the momentum in Catalan - mobilised up to now against a rotten state that lives off its wealth and power. October 1 and 8 have got to be merged and build a new energy from a new political perspective.
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