CNT and CGT Statements Below

shared from Dear Kitty. Some blog

”A Nation-state is always divisive and repressive, but as the only possibility for more freedom and justice, then of course we support these aspirations and endeavours”.

Spain annuls Catalan self-government, prepares military rule from Madrid

By Alex Lantier: Three weeks after the savage police crackdown on the October 1 Catalan independence referendum, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced the invocation of Article 155 to strip Catalonia’s regional government of its powers. In its place, Madrid is to install an unelected government in Barcelona backed by the Spanish army, Guardia Civil paramilitary police and other police units.

The implementation of Article 155 will inevitably involve the Spanish regime in a violent confrontation with broad masses of the Catalan population, where there is deep opposition to Madrid’s turn to dictatorship. As Rajoy’s Council of Ministers formulated the measures on Saturday, a half million people marched in Barcelona against Madrid’s arbitrary arrest of two Catalan nationalist politicians, Jordi Sànchez of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and Jordi Cuixart of Omnium Cultural.

Catalan separatists are mobilizing a human shield and a Civil Disobedience Campaign to block efforts by the Spanish authorities to take control . Tens of thousands plan to concentrate around the regional government’s headquarters in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter and the nearby parliament building. They expect Spanish police to use force to try to shut down the administration and will put their bodies on the line, said one person.

The measures laid out by the Council of Ministers entail the suspension of democratic forms of rule in Catalonia and the installation of what is a government of military occupation in all but name. They include:

* Removing Catalan Premier Carles Puigdemont and all Catalan regional ministers and replacing them with “organs or authorities created for this purpose or designated by the [Spanish] government.”

* Transferring their authority to call regional elections to the Spanish government.

* Granting full powers for Madrid to control the Catalan regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, to deploy police or Guardia Civil units to the region, and to take other security measures.

* Assigning control of “economic, financial, tax and budgetary” powers in Catalonia to the Spanish Treasury.

* Stripping the Catalan parliament of power to name a government or exercise oversight of the authorities set up by Madrid in Catalonia.

* Transferring control of Catalan public media to Madrid, which will control them so as to guarantee “respect for the values and principles contained in the Spanish constitution.”

Reuters reported that Catalonia said on Monday it was confident all officials including police would defy attempts by Madrid to enforce direct rule on the region.“It’s not that we will refuse (orders). It is not a personal decision. It is a seven million-person decision,” Romero asserted.

These measures are to be approved at the end of the week by the Spanish Senate, where Rajoy’s right-wing Popular Party (PP) has an absolute majority.

Madrid’s move to suspend Catalan autonomy marks a historic collapse of democratic forms of rule in Western Europe. It is 40 years ago today that Catalan nationalist politician Josep Taradellas returned to Barcelona from exile in France to lead the Catalan government, as the fascist regime installed by Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War collapsed amid mass struggles of the working class.

The granting of language rights and self-government to Catalonia was seen as key to overcoming the fascist heritage of Franco, who had banned the public use of the Catalan language.

Now Madrid is moving with the support of the European Union to repudiate the concessions in terms of social and democratic rights of the post-Franco period. At last week’s EU summit in Brussels, held after Rajoy pledged to invoke Article 155, EU leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron, all explicitly endorsed Rajoy’s onslaught against Catalonia.

Not only Guardia Civil, but also Spanish army units, including the Arapiles motorized infantry regiment in Catalonia, are being prepared for action.

An explosive conflict with revolutionary implications is being set into motion. Madrid’s imposition of an unelected dictatorship, after the October 1 referendum produced a 90 percent vote by over 2 million people for Catalan independence, will provoke mass resistance. The PP, which received a mere 8 percent of the vote in Catalonia’s last regional elections, has virtually no support or electoral presence there.

In Barcelona, La Vanguardia warned of the deep-rooted opposition Madrid’s power grab will unleash. Among Catalans, it wrote, “many are those who, without being secessionists, will cry bitter tears at the imminent collapse of the self-government obtained in 1977.” It continued: “Politics in the Iberian peninsula does not admit nuance. The message written in the sand is this: Catalonia is to be punished.”

On Saturday, buses and trains were packed as people came from across Catalonia to Barcelona for the 450,000-strong protest against the jailing of Sànchez and Cuixart. Puigdemont joined the protest, as did representatives of Catalonia’s main political parties, trade unions and associations. Protesters whistled and booed at Guardia Civil helicopters that flew overhead and shouted the anti-Franco slogan of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, “No pasarán” (“They will not pass”).

Workers at Catalan public television and radio are making clear they do not intend to obey Madrid’s diktat. TV3 workers issued a statement denouncing Article 155 as a “direct, unworthy and impudent attack on freedom of expression, of information and of the press and on the professionalism of the workers.” They said they would remain loyal to the Catalan parliament, “democratically elected on September 27, 2015.”

The works committee at Catalunya Ràdio issued a statement with the heading: “Without public media there is no democracy.” The statement pledged to defy the PP. It warned that if the central government chose a new director for the radio station, “we will have no other choice than to refuse to recognize his authority.”

It is vital for workers across Spain and Europe to oppose Madrid’s plans for more bloody repression in Catalonia. The political goal of the onslaught being prepared by Rajoy and the EU against the workers and masses of Catalonia is ever clearer: it is to stabilize a crisis-ridden EU by terrorizing the workers with the example of police-military dictatorship over an entire province.

The assault on Catalonia is exposing the class content of the vast attacks on democratic rights launched around the world since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Attempts by US and EU authorities to justify the massive build-up of police units, electronic spying capabilities and domestic military deployments like the French state of emergency by referring to a so-called “war on terror” are a political fraud. The main target is not Al Qaeda-linked Islamists, many of whom are financed by allies of the EU and the United States in wars for regime change in Syria and beyond. In Catalonia, the EU powers all support Madrid’s use of these powers to target peaceful political opposition because they are preparing to do the same.

Madrid’s claim, supported explicitly by the EU, that military rule is the only possible response to the Catalan independence referendum is an absurd lie, drenched in imperialist hypocrisy. Scotland held a referendum on independence from Great Britain in 2014, and Quebec held referendums on independence from Canada in 1980 and 1995. Neither London nor Ottawa marched tens of thousands of paramilitary police and army units to assault peaceful voters and forcibly preempt moves by these areas from seceding.

On the other hand, the NATO imperialist powers repeatedly invoked their supposedly sacred duty to defend secessionist movements—in Kosovo in 1999 and in Benghazi, Libya in 2011—to justify attacking countries such as Yugoslavia and Libya they were targeting for conquest.

It requires no great imagination to see how advocates of “humanitarian” imperialism like the Green politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the [French] New Anti-capitalist Party’s Olivier Besancenot would have reacted had videos emerged in 2011 of Libyan security forces assaulting peaceful voters and beating elderly women, as the Guardia Civil did on October 1. Denouncing Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for attacking “his own people”, they would have demanded that NATO accelerate its timetable for bombing Libya and assassinating Gaddafi.

Cohn-Bendit is not, however, calling for bombing Madrid or murdering Rajoy. He is holding friendly meetings with Macron as Paris gives a green light for Rajoy to launch a neo-Francoite assault on Catalonia while preparing a further police-state build-up under cover of the French anti-terror law.

Spanish opposition to Rajoy’s violence, not only in Catalonia

People in two Spanish cities, Valencia and Bilbao, flooded the streets to voice their support for the referendum in Catalonia.

Spain: ‘Madrilenians for the Right to Decide’ show solidarity with Catalan referendum



30 September 2017..A group of Madrilenians held a rally in support of the Catalan independence referendum, in the Spanish capital, on Saturday, during which they spread a giant Catalan flag across a square.

This 1 October 2017 video from the Plaza del Sol in Madrid shows a big demonstration against Spanish police violence against voters in Catalonia.

This October 2017 video from Zaragoza in Aragon shows a big demonstration against Spanish police violence against voters in Catalonia.



Statement by the CNT Barcelona on the latest actions by the Spanish state. Originally published by CNT Barcelona. Translated by Enough is Enough. Note: Enough is Enough is not organizing any of these events, we are publishing this text for people across the US and Europe to be able to see what is going on and for documentation only. Read all our reports about Catalonia; here. Catalonia: Statement by CNT Barcelona on the Latest Actions by the Spanish State From CNT Barcelona, ​​we want to show our rejection and discomfort in the current situation we live in Catalonia. We are witnessing institutional totalitarianism that shows the result of the smoke screen called “democratic transition”. We are experiencing the total failure of parliamentarism, of representative democracy. There is no doubt that the latest actions prove it, there are no deceptions, there are no words that blur it in thousand and one terms that have always served the factual powers to try to blur their interests. The arrests of the presidents of the ANC and Omnium have opened thei eyes of many people. During the anarcho-syndicalist struggle we have been suffering from repression by the Spanish State in collaboration with the Generalitat (Catalan government, translator) for many years. So we want to remind of all the anarchists taken, repressed by a system that never, absolutely never, allowed them to think and act outside the established parameters. The simple fact of building alternative spaces has already meant the systematic persecution of the libertarian movement. The Pandora cases, for example, have already demonstrated to what extent is the capitalist system and its allies are able to repress the self-organized spaces. Remembering Mónica and Francisco or the anarcho-syndicalists reprimanded by the “Caso Corte Inglés ” or the “Casino del Poblenou case”, among others, are clear examples that the parliamentary system is controlled by elites who will never leave the power to the working class, because they are scared. They fear that their modus vivendi, sustained in the control / repression of the working class, is threatened by self-organization. We want to make clear our rejection to the institutions where these policies are being channeled, prisons.Thousands of people have to suffer from an unequal, corrupt and unjust system. One of the most flagrant cases of the systematic violation of human rights can be found in CIES , where prisoners live in a situation below any human dignity. To company Ibrahima , who has been the victim of institutional racism and jailed simply for being who he is, to come from wherever you come, we send you all our solidarity. To denounce the most stubborn patriarchal system that rests in the prisons of women, it must be fought, and we will not stop in our struggle and demands. If you can imagine a world without inequalities, you can imagine a world without prisons. That is how we focus on our position of building an alternative for the working class. Today, now, we are suffering from repressive situations in our jobs. The trade union section of Portuaris, for example, has been threatened directly by police unions, simply because they explained the truth. Coerced daily in the workplace, suffering from insults, registries and controls. Now, more than ever, seeing how fascism is occupying the neighborhoods and institutions, we reaffirm ourselves as anarcho-syndicalists. The CNT is defined as an alternative space to combat this situation, a space where the defense of the workforce of each individual is the basis of our struggle. That they do not dare to think, for a moment, that we will only observe this situation. We will go to the street, you will see us in the jobs, we will point out the culprits who take the most basic rights of the workers and we will not rest until they are respected. Neither clergy nor monarchy nor state nor bourgeoisie. The streets will always be ours. CNT Barcelona, October 22, 2017

Statement by CGT Anarcho syndicalist trade union

The Confederal Committee of the CGT unanimously approved the following resolution regarding the situation in Catalonia

The political events in Catalonia and the repression of the Spanish State against the Catalan people make clear a need for the CGT

Press Office of the Confederal Committee of the CGT

Posted by RojoyNegro_Digital on Fri, 10/20/2017 – 11:55.

The CGT is absolutely against the escalating repression that the Government of the Spanish State has launched against the population of Catalonia and we will defend the reprisaled people of our class from repression from wherever it comes. In the same way we are against the repression exercised by the government of the Generalitat de Catalunya.

The CGT defends all civil liberties, that of assembly and demonstration, of free association, freedom of expression, the right to strike, etc …, and also supports the right to decide on all aspects of life, in all territories and across the globe, and direct democracy as a formula for decision-making.

We respect and defend the right to cultural and social diversity of each place, with all the implications that this has on the daily lives of people.

We defend the right to self-determination of all peoples. Self-determination implies, for the CGT, the capacity to decide everything above all, and has to be concretized in the practice of real self-management at all levels (economic, social, etc.).



The CGT does not support the construction of any state, either in the form of a republic or in any other form. The CGT has, among the principles that define it, the fight against all the states, and will continue defending and sponsoring the disappearance of the nation-states.



The CGT defends the Self-management of society and the end of capitalism as a system.



The CGT is not going to be used by blackmail and the strategies of the political classes, Catalan, Spanish, or any other place, because we understand that this will not improve the exploitation situation of our class.



The CGT is part of the working class and does not accept to participate in interclassist processes of territorial management, next to who exploits and represses us (Mordaza, Pandora I and II laws, Piñata, violent evictions of the places during 15M, Evictions, Reforms ,

Because of our participation in strike pickets, police and legal assemblies, etc.), because we are a class organization, autonomous, federalist, internationalist, self-managed and libertarian, what we define as anarcho-syndicalist.

That is why General Sgt. Of the CGT, José Manuel Muñoz Póliz, closed the meeting by highlighting that “these events today will be a scenario in the not too distant future whose objective will be to continue to repress the working class.”

Press Office of the Confederal Committee of the CGT

El Comité Confederal de la CGT aprueba por unanimidad la siguiente resolución en relación con la situación en Catalunya