The antidote against the indepentists: a non-nationalist left

 

Julián Sánchez Urrea

 

Speaker of THE LEFT TODAY

 

Almost nobody discovers that the "proces" has taken a good part of the Catalan social and trade union left and threatens to do so with the whole of the Spanish left. In Catalonia, social conflicts are buried,  are obviated or forgotten, public services are deteriorated, cuts are consolidated and welfare is receding, regardless of the Government or of any of its Members. The same is extending to other places in Spain, where it is difficult to talk about the problems of the people, how to solve them, since the Catalan conflict occupies everything, between the tiredness of the people and the impotence of seeing their demands postponed. The Andalusian elections have been a clear example of this.

For a time now, increasingly important sectors of the left have raised the alarm, urging to rescue it from the clutches of populism and nationalism.

There will be those who may be surprised by the understanding, when not explicit mutual support of Populism and Nationalism. There is a natural confluence: their kingdom is not that of the people who live on his salary and effort. Both creeds have as their objective their own power and as a means the invention of enemies to put before the just indignation of people in need of change and also of truthful and critical information.

Populism composes a moral discourse that replaces, cushions, covers and ignores social conflict, reducing certain problems to a tale of good and bad. The confrontation of interests resulting from the economic model is reduced to a question of ethics in a game of media artifice, where what is said prevails, not what is done, with insolvent and unrealizable proposals and with already palpable consequences: manipulation, half-truths, lies and contradictions that lead to frustration and insolvency. An explosive cocktail.

If Populism caricatures subjects, nationalism preaches that the conflict is not social or economic, but territorial. Subjective would be to delve into how much there is of tradition, education or culture transmitted so that people put the reference of "where they live" and collective history and future in common before the "how they live" and that obviously does not exclude the history or the common future.

What is clear is that a feeling is respectable but difficult to evaluate. What sets us against Nationalist independentism is not the feeling, but that passion for the land wants to hide that there are those who work for a salary to live and there are those who collect benefits to accumulate wealth and power. Such a view breaks the romanticism and it looks awesome that nationalists who make furious speeches, also meeting in this point with other populist forces like Podemos, of good and bad, of  tyrants and subjugated, or of the occupation forces and oppressed, forget how crudely the economy puts everybody in its place, which is not their town, but their social class.

The democratic society does not need to recognize its identity exclusively or excluding. Secession has nothing to do with the emancipation of work, except for dependent peoples, violently occupied and unable to develop democratically. To compare those situations with some identities in our country is an insult to peoples like the Kurdish, Saharawi or Palestinian.

The success of some nationalist process in Spain is not due to the ideological nationalism of its people, but to the tortuous ability to state that having its own State and only for that, would improve the lives of the people. And that is precisely the political scam. More clear: a Catalan right-wing government is preferable to a Spanish government of the left. If that is accepted, one can presume of being "indepentist".

And it seems obvious, but it must be said more often: there is no leftist or progressive project in populism, be it nationalist, pro-independentist or defending the right to decide independence.

The Left seeks and needs to defend a plural and solidary State, guarantor of liberties and equality of men and women, provider of social protection and committed to environmentally sustainable economic development and public policies that achieve Social Welfare as a priority objective .

We look for and need a left that understands that a society as plural, diverse and stratified as ours, can not do politics taking as reference only the most extremist realities that exclude majorities. Talking about dichotomies, as they both do, is an easy resource, the complex thing is to give solutions to the social majority that wants employment, shelter, education, right to health and dignified attention to the elderly.

The left can not be a nationalist, in any case it will be an internationalist because it belongs to the people. And why do the people of this country have to accept that they amputate a part of our territory, invoking rights that do not exist and that, therefore, we do not accept? Does anyone believe that the people that we feel on the left can accept that the working social majority be divided by divine right to make us even weaker in the face of economic power? It is not realistic. On the contrary, we maintain that is a task of the left-wing to defend the integrity of our country, because that is how we defend the unity of the workers living in Spain, regardless of where they were born or what their country of origin is, without asking for pedigrees. To defend it is to protect people so that there is more social equality, more solidarity, more social and labor rights, more and better pensions.

We are not convinced by the siren songs with which nationalism aims to attract us the federalists. We know that federalism is not in the road map of the right to decide independence or in any referendum of self-determination. Our federalism is unitary, solidary and bilingual, in harmony and coexistence, without linguistic immersion of any of the co-official languages.

Be that as it may, the best antidote against the independence movement is a left that puts in the forefront the social agenda of defense of essential public services: education, health, social welfare, dependency and public pensions, but also that claims that this country is our also and we will not give it to anyone.

https://www.cronicapopular.es/2019/01/el-antidoto-contra-los-indepes-una-izquierda-no-nacionalista/