We reaffirm our commitment to the principle of national self-determination in connection with the referendums on independence that took place on September 25 in Iraqi Kurdistan and October 1 in Catalonia.

The Catalans have separate (from the Castilian Spaniards) ethnic identity, their own language, their own experience with statehood and subsequent history of a national movement against the policy of assimilation and oppression pursued by Spain . Catalonia has no less grounds for independence than, for example, Portugal or neighboring Andorra. .

The current Spanish regime is the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy imposed by the fascist dictatorship of Franco in 1978, the successor to the old monarchy and fascism. It puts forward the slogan of ‘ indissoluble unity ’ of Spain contrary to the real multinationality of the country, and it has defended and continues to defend this principle by violence.

We are outraged by the (expected) duplicity of the authorities of the EU and Russia who have rejected Catalonian (as well as Iraqi Kurdish ) self-determination, though the former favored the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the latter protected and defended the self-determination of Crimea and, partly, the Donbass region.

We welcome the establishment in Catalonia of a republican form of government instead of an archaic monarchy. We also hope for

the withdrawal of Catalonia from NATO and its subsequent peaceful policy;

solidarity of the revolutionary Catalans with other national liberation movements including the Spanish and French Basques, divided Kurds, the Russians of the South-East of Ukraine, the Tamils ​​of Lanka, the Nepalese Madhesi and other peoples who struggle for the respect of their national identity and self-determination in the form of a federation or their own national state.

We are aware that the national liberation of the Catalan people is not just burdened by bourgeois ideologies but it is headed by the same capitalists who were part of the monarchical regime. So it is quite impossible to firmly rely on these or other further progressive steps. However, following Stalin’s instructions we do not perceive such steps as a condition for supporting the national movement or the right of nations to self-determination. The transform from the dependent periphery to a national state contributes to the political development of this country (as well as its former metropoly) and to the political delimitation of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as far as possible in the conditions of a rich imperialist center with the appropriate prevalence of the labor aristocracy.