Miguel Candel
Co-spokesperson
of ‘Izquierda en Positivo’ and Professor Emeritus of History of Philosophy in
the University of Barcelona
It is enough to
see the amount of white hair that marks the demonstrations of the Catalan
independence movement, as well as its predominance in the heads of those who
deal with the propaganda stalls mounted by ANC and Òmnium Cultural, to convince
ourselves of the correctness of the adjective and the first noun in the title of
this text. Justifying, on the other hand, the last noun requires a certain
knowledge of the history of many owners of the gray hair alluded to, as well as
of the evolution of the Spanish "radical" left in its long journey
from revolutionary optimism to populist opportunism dressed in leftist rags.
But the first
thing to notice is that nationalism does not have its base on the left. Quite
the contrary: in most known nationalist movements, of course also in those
here, the predominant political ideology can be considered basically
right-wing. Not only the resulting ideology but also the starting ideology: no
matter how much a nationalist comes from the left, the ideology that he has
embraced is unmistakably rightist, for the simple reason that his main values are
antagonistic to solidarity, fraternity and equality; so that in the end he ends
up converging with those who have always defended those anti-values. However,
after this clarification has been made, I think I can posit that the support
received by the Catalan secessionist procés
in sectors of the political left (in a proportion practically the opposite of
what it receives from the social left) could be explained by, among others, the
following factors:
a) There is in Spain a whole "lost political generation" (in which I include myself) of anti-Francoists disenchanted with the form adopted by the Transition. After waiting for years that the democracy that inevitably had to come after the unintelligent dictatorship of the "Ratón [mouse] del Pardo" (suggestive expression heard more than once by this author in the mythical "Radio Pirenaica") would eventually contain important doses of social revolution, we had to endure Franco’s death in bed (not without having a rough time, apparently) and that the so-called "reformers of the regime" would frame, as one says, the democratic opposition. No provisional government that would start over with a clean slate and would call elections to a constituent assembly; no debugging in the judiciary branch, the police and the armed forces; no annulment of sentences without procedural guarantees that had led to death or endless penalties of jail to tens of thousands of citizens opposed (or simply not attached) to the "Uprising"; nothing about posthumous rehabilitation of those victims.
Instead, we got
a law of political reform passed by the Francoist Courts themselves and
ratified in a referendum on the usual style of the Regime, in which we had to
choose between ‘Guatemala’ [the bad] (the problematic and narrow framework
opened by that reform) and ‘Guatepeor’ [the worse] (the maintenance of the
dictatorial regime, just like that). But while this project that many of us described
as "Franco-free Francoism" ("tied and well tied") was making
its way, the hopes for a further qualitative leap that would allow breaking
those ties remained, in general, unscathed.
b)
Discouragement began to spread later: paradoxically, as the qualitative jump
(better to say "slow rise") was taking place. Because then it was
seen very clearly that the vast majority of the population was not for the task
of assaulting winter, summer or mid-season palaces; instead, it settled for
gradual changes that, however modest they might seem, were judged according to
the saying "it's better to have a bird in the hand than a hundred
flying." On the other hand, the minority of the left unsatisfied with that
process measured the achieved with the yardstick of what was expected, and the
result seemed scarce, very scarce. The frustration generated by the realization
that the turtle of the agreed slow change had won the Achilles career of the
revolution received a name, widely used at the time (even by the political
leaders of the left who had assumed that dynamic as the best of all possible):
the "disenchantment".
c) The result
of this disenchantment was that a minority of that formerly maximalist minority
would convert overnight to low-ranking "realism" and opt for giving
way to their political ambitions in the parties most identified with the
situation, from the presumed social democracy to the right of liberal
appearance, including in the latter the Catalan nationalist right wing of the
time, which asserted its lukewarm attitude of distancing from the Francoism in
the cultural sphere (but not in the socio-economic one) as proof of their
“lifelong” democratic mood.
d) Most of the
"disenchanted", on the other hand, chose to abandon all kinds of
affiliation and dedicate themselves to the cultivation of their "inner
garden", preserving, at best, the nostalgia for the ideals of yesteryear. And so on
until four days ago, so to say.
e) Meanwhile,
the aforementioned Catalan nationalist right wing had obtained a diploma of
democratic purity generously issued by a left that ended up making of its need
to politically agree with it the virtue of giving it the cultural hegemony. And
then the crisis came. That is, the umpteenth manifestation of the recurrent
crisis inherent in the capitalist economic system. Recurrence that the majority
usually forgets in the years of bonanza, reason why it feels surprised and
desolate when the riders of the Apocalypse burst again, even if clothed in its postmodern
version. The most surprised and desolate are, of course, those who had most
lost sight of the true nature of the system in which they live: the badly-called
"middle classes". Neither the elites at the helm of the system nor
the more modest workers who live in the bilge ignore the wild nature of the sea
in which they sail, the ones because they are always up to date with the
weather, the others, because they are used to feeling the waves.
So that,
properly prepared the social terrain of Catalonia through irrigation and
constant fertilizing with nationalist prejudices, broad sectors of the
intermediate social layers ended up being seduced by the idea that this
territory, politically segregated from the rest of Spain, would be safe from
new economic storms and would allow for the development of a new community,
culturally and sentimentally homogeneous and well avenue, where everything
would be "flowers and violets". And it is at this point when the
"return of the repressed" takes place in the minds of many former
leftists. There are those who believe they discover in this new movement the
chance to relive their old youthful adventures of street mobilization,
silencing in passing their bad conscience of apostates for having politically
surrendered, back in the eighties, rising with their vote to the chariot of
social-liberalism, Liberalism or pure and simple conservatism. And, logically,
this process of second "conversion", or better, reconversion, takes
place with a force directly proportional to the degree of "apostasy"
of the leftist ideals when they were young (the "fury of the
convert"). On the contrary, it seems, statistically speaking (and,
therefore, with the exceptions of rigor), that the greater resistance to accept
the course imposed by the Transition at that time, the greater resistance also
now to swallow the wheels of the "procés".
To the bad
conscience of that reconverted left which deceives itself by believing that
destroying the "78 regime" through the fragmentation of the State is
the only way to fight nowadays against the capitalist system (daydream
reinforced by slogans like "Down with the Ibex 35!"), it is to be added
the no less senile tendency of other people, who were never in the left, to
wash a youthful past of absolute conformism with the redeeming balm of
last-minute independence activism.
We have then
that those who first (hastily, even) recognized at the time the inability to
write an Iliad now give themselves fervently to compose a Batrachomyomachia (a
ridiculous "battle between frogs and mice"), making once again true
that history repeats itself but degraded: from tragedy to farce. The trouble is
that farces sometimes degenerate into tragedies, lacking, in this case, the
slightest heroic trait. And tragedy can end up being - it is already so to a
great extent - the growing rupture of a society like the Catalan one in a
conflict without apparent exit.
Not to mention
the tragedy that it implies, for the Spanish left as a whole, to deviate from
its own mission of struggle against inequality and in favor of solidarity and
unity among workers to follow, on the contrary, the apparent shortcut of
supporting the secessionist breakup concealed under the ‘take it or leave it’ of
the "right to decide". Nothing illustrates better the disastrousness of
the price paid by the left in Catalonia when buying in those broken goods than
the show of so many working-class neighborhoods of Barcelona and its belt
giving their vote to the right.
One can
understand that, faced with the seemingly unstoppable advance of the
individualist ideology consubstantial with contemporary neoliberal capitalism,
together with the inability of the traditional left to oppose effective
resistance, there might be those who seek to feel protected by new forms of
community no longer articulated around a class consciousness that the dominant
system has managed to pulverize thanks to the changes introduced in the
organization of work worldwide. And nationalism (like all forms of populism)
offers an easy path to that integration. But it seems incredible that people of
the left allegedly vaccinated against so many forms of false consciousness as
we have known in the last half century might have fallen into such one, so
irrational and so sustained in a shameless lie, which dares to cover with democracy
clothes an ethnicist, supremacist and radically unsupportive ideology. Decidedly,
the forge that was to forge the new man is much less powerful than we thought.
Hélas.
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