Police violence against peaceful demonstrators in Barcelona. Military occupation by Iraqi army forces in Kirkuk. Institutions of autonomy and self-rule severely undermined from Catalonia to Kurdistan. The images are shocking, the state repression certainly repulsive. How did these nationalist conflicts become so polarized? What triggered such aggressive state responses? How are these ongoing conflicts likely to develop? And what are the prospects for rights-expanding, emancipatory denouements in each case?

It’s been over a century since Rosa Luxemburg rightly insisted upon the need to critically evaluate all claims about abstract and utopian principles — such as the principle of self-determination — in terms of their concrete impact on both local and global constellations of power relations. However, Luxemburg’s prescient warnings were long drowned out by the triumph of Marxism-Leninism and its influence upon the terms and horizons of so many anti-colonial struggles.

Nearly a generation after the demise of state communism, and nearly sixty years since the transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism, it is high time for us to heed Red Rosa’s sage advice, to strike a consistent chord in favor of internationalist revolutionary ideals. The global scope of the urgent problems that beset humanity, that threaten its very future, require globally coordinated forms of resistance. The global scope of “intersecting” and unjust hierarchies, of deeply-entrenched systems of domination — of class, of race, of gender — means that, now less than ever, the fatal formula of socialism in one country will simply not suffice.

Even so, the “international left” remains confused, still-clinging to hollow dogmas about the principle of self-determination, all-too-often mystified by reified, essentialist and nationalist visions and divisions of the social world, all-too-rarely capable of providing sober and “ruthlessly critical” analyses of the dynamics of mobilization and counter-mobilization at work in particular power struggles, in particular “peoplehood projects,” much less how such particular projects and power struggles relate to broader global trends.

We need look no further than the cases of Catalonia and Kurdistan, both dominating the headlines in recent days and weeks, where two highly contested, unilateral referendums on “self-determination” have taken place, in both instances reflecting as well as exacerbating already-spiraling dynamics of polarization and repression. The discussion of these conflicts in left-wing circles, perhaps especially in the English language, leaves much to be desired.

In both cases, even the most critical of analysts tend to bow before the sacred principle of self-determination, and thus tend to avoid evaluating secessionist tactics in the “ruthlessly critical” terms of their impact on local and global constellations of power relations. In both cases, the machinations of political elites have been confused and conflated with the “will of the people.” In both cases, “the Catalans” and “the Kurds” tend to be referred to as if they were unitary actors. In both cases, serious differences and divisions within, and perhaps especially at the margins of, these reified “national communities,” as well as competing projects of “self-determination,” have been systematically ignored — as have the serious differences and divisions within their reified “national” opponents. Such are the insidious ways of nationalist reification.

Conflict in Catalonia

In the case of Catalonia, much enthusiasm has been expressed in favor of the tactics and strategy of the expressly anti-capitalist Candidaturas d’Unitat Popular (CUP). And indeed, the CUP’s programmatic emphasis on feminism, social ecology and direct democracy is certainly to be lauded. Even so, its relative strength within secessionist ranks has tended to be overestimated, and its exclusive commitment to tactics of unilateral rupture, its dogmatic faith in the formula of “national independence” as the route to rupture with capitalism, must be critically interrogated.

This dogmatic formula has predictably led the CUP into a coalition with kleptocratic, bourgeois secessionist forces, legitimated via a miraculous 1515-1515 assembly vote. In this capacity, in 2015, the CUP would even be driven to vote in favor of the “regional” austerity budget. The CUP’s insistence upon the urgency of unilateral secession has also had predictably little success in attracting much in the way of support in the old industrial belt.

Indeed, all too little has been said about the limits to the appeal of the secessionist project in Catalonia, or its impact upon the broader terms of political contestation throughout all of Spain. For starters, as Antonio Santamaria has rightly emphasized, a look at participation rates in different municipalities proves most illustrative of the definite limits to secessionist appeal amongst the working class in Catalonia. For example, in the emblematic industrial belt town of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, the rate of participation in the referendum came in at less than 18 percent of the electoral census; whereas in the emblematically wealthy town of Sant Cugat del Vallès, by contrast, the rate of participation was over 54 percent.

To make matters worse, polarization around the “national question” has served to legitimate austerity politics and to keep corrupt, demagogic politicians unaccountable on both sides of the Ebro river. At the same time, it has served to shift the terms of debate forced onto the agenda by the indignados, who framed the basic antagonism in fundamentally class terms, as a struggle between haves and have-nots, rather than as a conflict between territories, a struggle between “nations.” Given the concrete constellation of social relations in the Iberian peninsula, it is very difficult for a struggle framed primarily in “national” terms to avoid the fait accompli of dividing and conquering the working class, not only in Catalonia but, perhaps especially, in the rest of Spain, too.

Given the balance of both legal and brute force, unilateral independence for Catalonia is nothing short of a pipe dream; some sort of negotiations with the political forces in power in Madrid would always be required to achieve a successful secessionist outcome. And, of course, the ideological orientation of the Spain-wide hegemonic bloc with whom would-be secessionists must negotiate matters quite a bit. So even out of self-interest, one might expect the secessionist bloc to work to strengthen the prospects and voice of the broader Spanish left. But instead, their unilateral secessionist tactics have played right into the hands of the Spanish right.

Not that the broader Spanish left is blameless. The “parliamentary cretinism” and opportunism of Podemos, and, to a lesser extent, even some of the municipal platforms — their co-optation, usurpation and at least partial undermining of the grassroots demands and direct-democratic logic of the indignado movement — has undoubtedly limited the appeal and potential of their counterhegemonic new-new-left project, and thus, by extension, helped pave the way for the substitution of class conflict by national conflict, with horizons of contestation polarized not for and against painful policies of austerity, but instead, for and against the so-called procés.

Pablo Iglesias and especially Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona and leader of the Comunes, have done their best to maintain a posture of calculated ambiguity, to keep the prospects for a “third way” between unilateral secession and ever-increasing state repression alive. But such efforts threaten to be drowned out in the successive waves of polarizing confrontation between Spanish and Catalan nationalisms.

Meanwhile, the bankrupt neoliberal “social democrats” of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) have fallen into line with the authoritarian escalation and tactics of repression pursued by the Spanish authorities. The PSOE itself has been riven with conflict over the past year, with current leader Pedro Sánchez already deposed once but now back again, marginally more prone to accommodation and compromise on the national question than are his intra-party foes, who prefer to mimic the Spanish right’s belligerent language about an alleged Catalan “coup” from the pages of El País, and do their best to legitimate and applaud (when not deny) state repression and police violence.