In 1659, in the First War of Occupation, France occupied the northern part of the Pyrenees, and in a second war, between 1707 and 1714, the Spanish army occupied the south part of the Pyrenees. It is then that the period of French and Spanish inner imperialism starts.
In the Industrial Era (1830-1960), the Spanish powers, closely linked to the juridical, clerical and military branches, with the submission of the Catalan industrials bourgeoisie, crushed the numerous revolts of the working class, while modernizing the systems of oppression and the control of the means of production of the country. In 1936-39, the bellicose situation allowed the Catalan government a high degree of autonomy. A strategic process of collectivization of the economy -industrial and agricultural- and of nationalization of the industry occurred. This process was frustrated by Franco's Spanish-fascist dictatorship during almost 40 years. The -formal- reform of the Spanish State (1977) has not changed neither the general structure nor the relations of power and people, but it has reinforced the kernels and mechanisms of power and sustained the plunder, the oppression and the degree of dependence of the Catalan people.
Many Catalan antifascist fighters joined the fight for socialism and freedom far from home. This led them to fight Nazism. As a consequence of this human and political commitment, they were witnesses of the Nazi horror on being deported to concentration and extermination camps (Mathausen and Ravensbrück). The anti-Nazi fight is also a part of our story.
In reference to the French state goes, it has never recognized the Catalan nation (eg. Catalan not being recognized as an official language) and it has enforced policies of dilution and assimilation of the Catalan population, for instance, sending young Catalans to the front of the First and Second World Wars in abominable conditions, which was a deliberate destruction of their own economic sectors and a consequent promotion of emigration.
A modern, antifascist and internationalist fight
All these atrocities made way for a new offensive of the "adjacent colonialism" of the Spanish and French states in Catalan territory. However, this new relaunching of the "adjacent colonialism" was stopped again, it foung a considerable theoretical and practical answer in the independentism of the left in general, and in the foundation of the PSAN (Socialist Party of National Liberation of the Catalan Countries) in 1969. This answer was inserted in the processes of national and anti-capitalist liberation, in the "adjacent colonies" (eg. Ireland, Ukraine), as well as in the "overseas colonies" (eg. Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam).
The fight of emancipation of the working class was united to the fight for national independence. The working class grew and spread at a national level, thus attaining political power. This corroborates that a fight of national liberal can only be promoted and driven by an ascending social class. Therefore, the independentist fight of the PSAN is aimed at obtaining a Catalan Socialist Republic in the World-Wide Socialist Internacional one.
It was no long before PSAN became a movement of masses in the 70s, becoming the first expression of the modern fight for the Catalan reunification, the recognition of an independent Catalan state, and the construction of the socialism in Catalonia. This fact has propitiated, up to now, several imprisonments, arrests, tortures, threats and parapolice outrages propitiated mostly by the Spanish State, like remarkable bourgeois manoeuvres with the goal of threatening and destroying the most dynamic and combative part of the Catalan society, that is, the organized independentism.
With this last failure in Catalonia two things have been exposed:
- The national contradictions are not always (as the capitalist bourgeoisie wants to make believe) an identity proble, totally on the contrary, it is a class struggle problem of the development of the productive forces, in which the workforce is the most outstandinh. In the case of Catalonia, the Spanish and French states are exploiting this strength and shaping the Catalan nation to their own interest, depriving them of a free development.
- The national issue can not be solved by the capitalist class, because it has itself created the current contradictions. Therefore, the direct relation between the unity of the working class and the national liberation is undeniable. The fight for the national independence is the first step towards socialism.
The fight for the freedom for Catalonia has to show to the workers of all the nations that there is not internationalism without the recognition and support of the fights of the oppressed nations, that there is no recognition of any nation without an independent state, and that there is no independent state without the upward social class that has the future in its hands: the Working Class.
For and Independent and Socialist Catalonia!
"Proletarians of All Countries, Unite"
Cap comentari:
Publica un comentari a l'entrada