Spain

Post Reply
User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Spain

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 02, 2017 1:28 pm

Catalonia Referendum: Statement by the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE) / Comunicado del Secretariado Político del PCPE

Statement by the Political Secretariat of the PCPE.

Following the events of today, the PCPE shows its concern for the increase of the repressive escalation in the Catalan conflict. Today the dictatorial nature of the State has been re-established, an element that we Communists have always denounced and for which we have especially warned in recent weeks.

The PCPE has spoken clearly about the political basis of the Catalan conflict and the proposals that the working class needs in order to get out of the false dichotomies in which nationalism seeks to trap it. We have said that the road of independentism is not useful for achieving self-determination in Catalonia. But while we try to get the working class to choose its own way, we believe that all those Catalans who wanted to express themselves through the vote had the right to do so without having to face police charges. The actions of the State aimed at preventing the vote, especially those of a police nature, have all our rejection.

The PCPE is concerned about the rise of nationalism. When the working class, by virtue of the defense of the homeland, gives a blank check to its government to confront the working class of other nations, it is being defeated. The defense of the country must always be the defense of the interests of its working class, interests always confluent with those of the entire international working class.

The Political Secretariat of the PCPE, 1 October 2017.

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/10 ... nt-by.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Spain

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 02, 2017 1:36 pm

In Catalonia’s ‘red belt’ leftwing veterans distrust the separatists
Nationalism is not the answer to Spain’s problems, say an older generation who fought against General Franco

Image
Thousands of pro-independence supporters rally in Montjuic, Barcelona, on 29 September. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Stephen Burgen in Barcelona

Saturday 30 September 2017 16.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 2 October 2017 06.34 EDT

In the war of words in the run-up to Catalan referendum, the language has grown increasingly intemperate, amid talk of dictatorship and “occupation” forces. The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, has even compared Spain to Turkey.

But for some Catalans who lived through the dictatorship and were beaten and jailed for demanding basic rights, such talk seems overblown.

“For young people it’s easy to believe that independence is going to usher in this wonderful Arcadia,” says Laura Jiménez, a veteran of the Catalan labour movement. “They can march in the streets and the police don’t bother them, they wreck a Guardia Civil car and nothing happens and then they call this Francoism. For heaven’s sake!”

Jiménez, 61, comes from Cornellà, one of a string of satellite towns thrown up around Barcelona to accommodate the mass migration from the south and west of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. The towns are known as the cinturón rojo, the red belt, because of their history of radical politics.

As the Baix Llobregat area south of Barcelona began to industrialise, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards abandoned the countryside in search of a better life up north. The factories and housing estates became a crucible of leftwing politics and to this day the cinturón rojo has never voted for nationalist candidates.

“El Baix Llobregat was the laboratory where we learned all about communism,” says Pepe Martínez, 64, who led the first general strike in the area in 1974. “For example, while we were still deciding whether to strike, one guy grabbed the microphone and shouted: ‘Workers of the Baix Llobregat, don’t fall for the siren voices of these revisionists. Now’s the time to establish a government of the workers and peasants’. There were people like that here,” he says, laughing at the memory.

Image
Laura Jiménez, Paco Arias, Pepe Martínez and Miguel Salas. Photograph: Stephen Burgen for the Observer

“When we were young, there was a dictatorship,” says Miguel Salas, 66, who from the age of 13 worked 12-hour days in a Madrid dairy before moving to the Baix Llobregat. “There was no question who was the enemy. There weren’t any Catalan nationalists.”

Salas got involved in politics and was jailed for 12 days when the police raided a secret union meeting. “They beat me up a bit but not too much,” he says. “That was my initiation.”

Another veteran of the struggle, Paco Arias, 81, recalls a confrontation between strikers and the Guardia Civil in Cornellà. “The cop was holding a pistol to my chest when another guy hit him from behind. The pistol fell to the ground and there was a moment when no one knew what would happen next. Then another cop picked it up and we ran off,” he says.

All four dismiss the independence movement as a distraction from more pressing social issues, claiming it has proved a useful smokescreen for the Catalan government’s spending cuts.

“What’s happening now is that everyone has been told that Spain is the origin of our problems,” says Salas. “They are being fed a version of Catalan history that has nothing to do with reality and this has radicalised young people around independence.”

“There’s been a sort of mantra, that Spain is robbing us, and there’s a lot of confusion, as though the Spanish government and the Spanish people were one and the same,” Jiménez says. “With a prime minister like Mariano Rajoy it’s very easy for everyone to oppose the government.”

The Baix Llobregat has its own history and none of the four feels included when politicians talk about “the Catalan people”, they say.

“All of us here are immigrants but we’re all Catalans, too,” says Martínez, who is dismissive of the case for Catalan independence. “It’s about class. I don’t have a problem with the person standing next to me, it’s the one above me who’s the problem.”
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Spain

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:14 pm

PCPE: The right of self-determination is unviable within the Spanish capitalist framework

Image

Source: International Communist Press.
The Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE) issued a statement on the last events in Catalonia.
The statment of the Political Secretariat of the PCPE discussed the last events in Catalonia and decisions of the Council of Ministers. It reminded that since the beginning of these events the Party had been "warning for months about the invalidity of the independentist process in Catalonia". The Party underlined the reasons "why the exercise of the right of self-determination is unviable within the Spanish capitalist framework".

The statement said "Capitalism has nothing to do with democracy, but with the monopoly of violence, which is today exclusively in the hands of the Spanish Government. The statement made yesterday (October 10, 2017) by the President of the Generalitat proves that the direction of the independentist process does not count, nor can count, on the strength to impose indenpendence. Large sectors of the Catalan people have been lead to a dead-end road which will generate a huge feeling of frustration."

It was observed that the contribution of some sectors of the Catalan nationalist left was "remarkable". The Party assessed that this is due to the wrong strategy to struggle under the flag of those who "brutally repressed the workers' struggle and approved ruthless capitalist policies together with the Socialist Party and the Popular Party in the past." It stated that the independentist process which has suffered a harsh political defeat is represented by the Catalan bourgeoisie as part of the "Spanish dominant class clear since October 1".


The PCPE criticized the supporters of the independence movement of not understanding "the class structure in current Spain" and warned that "the division among workers has alarmingly grown, the reaction has increased and fascist hate demonstrations have multiplied". The statement underlined that "The Spanish bourgeoisie has been given the perfect excuse to keep going on the reorganisation of the State, currently in process, under a deeply reactionary sense." The Spanish State is forcing the Government of Catalonia to submit, rejecting any mediation or negotiation which means that bourgeois politics on both sides "dwells on the popular feelings and the lives of millions of workers."

The Communist Party called all workers and the popular strata, especially women workers and the youth "to defend their common interests beyond any nationalist division". The call included to stop the advance of reaction and fascism, to stop the repression on the Catalan people, to defend the popular and workers unity beyond any national difference and to join together under the common goal of defeating the Spanish Capitalism, "in order to open the path to the proclamation of the Socialist Republic".

The call added that in the Socialist Republic of Spain the power would be in the hands of the working class, finding its "territorial basis in the union of free peoples, democraticly exerting their right to self-determination." The statement concluded with the slogan, "For the independence and unity of the popular and working class!"

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/10 ... on-is.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Spain

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 28, 2017 5:17 pm

Catalonia independence: PCPE reflects on the intra-bourgeois struggle for dominance in Spain

Image

In a brief video message issued on Saturday afternoon, Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont vowed to continue working to build “a free country”. “We must do so resisting repression and threats, without ever abandoning, at any time, civic and peaceful conduct,” he said, adding that his government did not have or want “the argument of force”.

Madrid reacted to the Catalan parliament’s unilateral declaration of independence on Friday by firing the regional government and dismissing the head of the local police force.

In sight of these rapid developments, we publish a recent press release (23/10/2017) issued by the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE) which reflects on the ongoing intra-bourgeois struggle in Spain and calls the working class to reject the repression by the Spanish state towards Catalonian workers and intensify the struggle for a homeland of labour based on fraternity.

The statement of the PCPE is as follows:
Yesterday the Council of Ministers adopted the Agreement which sets out the measures to be approved by the Senate on 27 October, in the implementation of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution in Catalonia.
Our Party, which is closely following the development of events, has clearly expressed in its communiqués of 2 October and 11 October the Communist position in the face of the serious succession of events that we face.
We have warned the working class and the popular sectors of all Spain, and especially of Catalonia, that there is no possibility of democratically exercising the right to self-determination in the framework of Spanish capitalism. We have explained the reasons why, from our point of view, the process of independence in Catalonia has entered a deadlock. We have positioned ourselves with absolute force against all repression against the Catalan people and we have called to fight against the advance of the reaction. We have called on the working class to defend its organizational, political and ideological independence against all nationalism, not to fight under false flags.
The Government of the Generalitat and the Government of Spain have long been feeding in a suicidal spiral, in which the measures adopted by one legitimize the other, and the same happens the other way round. In that crazy career, we, the workers have nothing to gain, but much to lose. Reactionary identity and exclusionary feelings are advancing which are characteristic of all nationalisms, and the massive use of state repression against large sectors is legitimized.
The Spanish bourgeoisie, of which the Catalan bourgeoisie is a part, is moving towards a large-scale reform of the Spanish political system and using the pro-independence process as a pretext for an even more rapid and reactionary advance. The agreement of the Council of Ministers yesterday, which the Communist Party flatly rejects, is one more piece of that gear.
The strength of the Spanish state, constantly undervalued by Catalan nationalism, is expressed in an intensive application of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution. The organs or authorities created or appointed by the Government of the Nation (Spanish Government) will assume all the powers of the Government and the parliament of the Generalitat (Catalan institutions). In the Agreement of the Council of Ministers, a clear threat to the workers of the Catalan Administration is included. In case they do not comply with the instructions of the state authorities, not only the disciplinary power will be exercised against them, but will be reported to the Public Prosecutor for the clearance of the corresponding criminal responsibilities.

Image

In these difficult times it is necessary that the workers' and people's forces reflect on the underlying causes behind all these events. The bourgeois forces have decided to reform the state to adapt its functions to what has long been happening in the economic base: the complete unification of the Spanish capitalist market.
In economic terms, the "coffee for all" era is over, an era that allowed the contradictions between fractions of the bourgeoisie to be largely resolved on the basis of the sharing of market shares through an asymmetric transfer of powers to the autonomies, allowing certain peculiarities in economic, fiscal or labour policy aimed at stimulating business profits in one or another autonomous community, and always depending on its strength, that is, its capital, even at the cost of producing serious territorial imbalances.
The Catalan bourgeoisie has ceased to express itself as a national class, as evidenced by the intense process of transferring the social headquarters of its main companies, the positioning of Catalan employers and the fact that its traditional political representative (Convergencia i Unió ) has imploded.
They are the lower sectors of the bourgeoisie, owners of so-called SMEs (small and medium enterprises), who, spurred by the intensification of capitalist competition motivated by the crisis, and accompanied by a small bourgeoisie at risk of severe proletarization, have driven and lead the independence process; manipulating the national sentiments of workers and popular sectors condemned to misery by capitalism and leading them to a dead end.
The Government of the Generalitat has only two options left. Or summon the Catalan Parliament, so that next Wednesday, October 25, the independence and the Catalan Republic will be declared, calling constituent elections in application of Law 20/2017, of legal and foundational transitoriness of the Republic, annulled by the Constitutional Court; or to call regional elections. In the first case, the Catalan government would be taking the social sectors that support the independence process to undergo state repression, a state who has in its hands the monopoly of violence. In the second case, the pro-independence block would be split without referral.
The working class and the people should not be confused by this "flag war". We must choose, yes, but not between a Catalan capitalism or a Spanish capitalism, which will exploit and oppress us in the same way. The working majorities must choose between continuing to live under a capitalist political system that exploits and oppresses us to the point of stealing our lives, or between following an independent path in which political power is in our hands, in the hands of the working class and the people.
We want a country for the working class, in which those who produce all take the reins of power, to ensure the satisfaction of social needs, so that our peoples have the freedom to democratically decide their future on the basis of maximum respect and integration of the cultural and linguistic expressions of the working people. And to do this, we must throw every foreign flag away, because the homeland of labour has nothing to do with the homeland of capital.
The bourgeoisie will try to ensure that the reorganization of the political system is carried out through a reactionary constitutional reform that will bring nothing good for the social majorities. We should not let ourselves be caught up in their game.
We must fight to prevent the progress of this process, which takes its first steps with the application in Catalonia of Article 155 of the Constitution, intensifying the class struggle. In face of the measures of the State:
- We must stop any type of repression against the workers in Catalonia, especially against the Catalan public employees and against the teaching workers who are directly threatened.
- We must stop any kind of repression against the culture and language of the Catalan working people, which the Spanish Government has set in its sights and which it is prepared to undertake through the intervention of Department of Education of the Generalitat.
- Let us defend the fraternity and unity of the workers of all the peoples of Spain and promote the struggle against the common enemy.
- We must stop the progress of the reaction. Facing the reactionary reform of the political system, we must intensify the struggle for a country for the working class.
The homeland of labour has nothing to do with the homeland of capital!
For a country for the working class!

https://communismgr.blogspot.gr/2017/10 ... ts-on.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply