Catalonia is in the midst of declaring independence from Spain. The situation is fluid, changing daily, and there is no clear end yet in sight. Commenting on the scene from America is further complicated by the lack of attention given to the turmoil and its underpinnings in the Anglosphere. When the bourgeois media has noticed the conflict in Catalonia, it has been framed in cultural and political terms; in fact, the events are yet one more example of the revolutions thrown up by the logic of racial capitalism. The barrier to proper English renderings of the Catalan Question is heightened still further by the historic strength of libertarian socialist ideas in that part of Spain; ghettoized as the land of Bakunin and Fanelli, even Western Marxists have largely missed the importance of events in Catalonia. A final obstacle lies in the intricacies of Catalonia’s political structure. Technically one of Spain’s sixteen Autonomous Regions, Catalonia has its own parliament, the Generalitat, in addition to the representatives it sends to the central legislative bodies in Madrid and Brussels; at each level – local, national, continental – there are dozens of parties, overlapping cross-party alliances, and linkages between the different levels of organization. In short, the deep history of Catalan resistance to exploitation by the center and the congenital misperceptions of the liberal media have surrounded the Catalan resistance in a fog. In spite of this, some basic considerations can be set down.

1

Although the situation has improved somewhat in the last month and a half, English-language media outlets have portrayed Franco’s coup in 1936 as the origin of the Catalan independence movement. Franco abolished the Generalitat and outlawed the Catalan language. The yearning to be free that inevitably sprung from this authoritarian suppression, the story goes, understandable though it may have been, became an outdated nostalgia once the Spanish constitution of 1978 recognized Catalonia as an autonomous region, with administrative control over culture, language, health, education, and justice, in addition to significant but limited legislative authority for a restored Generalitat. The drive for independence in recent years, these sources imply, is either a romantic atavism or a cynical appeal to Catalan chauvinism. Yet any proper understanding of the independence movement’s response to Franco must, at the very least, have as its immediate context the uprising that occurred under Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera (1923-30) not more than ten years prior, in 1925-6. Primo de Rivera’s response was nearly isomorphic to Franco’s later crack down; indeed, de Rivera went further in some areas, extending state repression into the church and dance halls. The 1925 rebellion was a response to de Rivera’s revocation of Catalonia’s (already extremely limited) legislative powers, an achievement only obtained in 1913. The fact is that the Catalan independence movement springs from much deeper wells than the twentieth century.

2

With the exception of the high Middle Ages, Catalonia has always had its labor exploited by non-Catalans. Indeed, it has been a liminal zone – a theatre of conflict and encounter between clashing nations and political economies – for most of history. Rarely have the terms of Catalonia’s exploitation been settled for more than a few generations, before it has been convulsed by either revolutions in the mode of production or a rotation of the guard.

Catalonia was the first Roman colony in Hispania. The latifundists that dominated the region were absent landlords, housed in the metropole, who exploited the slave and peasant labor of locals. While the slave mode of production was blunted in the eastern empire by the prior urbanization of Greco-Persian lands, there was no such historical check on the concentration of land, power, and control of labor in the west, with conditions of exploitation and the gradient of hierarchy worsening the further west one traveled, reaching its crescendo in Hispania. Roman education was provided to local elites, whose culture and language were thoroughly Latinized as a result; the linguistic barrier between elites on the one hand and slaves and peasants on the other served as the foundation for ethnic exploitation. Latin was the language of command, and proconsuls ruled as much by selectively offering opportunities for advancement to locals and cultural displays of dominance – the most prized of which was the gift of citizenship – as they did by force. In the later empire, a vulgar Latin developed in the western provinces.

When German tribes finally overran the legions, Visigoths took control of the machinery of the Roman state in north eastern Hispania, and thus of the latifundia. They maintained qualitatively similar property relations, but their physical presence altered the terms of ethnic relations and diluted the concentration of ownership. Strict miscegenation laws were put in place to maintain the racial purity of the German invaders. Unlike Roman cooptation of local elites, cultural opportunities were denied to the native population: strict laws regarding religious conversion and linguistic transfer were imposed, so that natives were Christian by law and could not worship at pagan alters. It was out of the admixture of vulgar Latin and Visigothic German that Catalan would, later, develop. Before that could happen, however, external intervention was required. The feudal mode of production, which emerged elsewhere in Europe as a synthesis of its two anterior modes of production – the Roman and German – was stymied in Hispania as a result of German-separatism; the two could not enter into productive conflict.

This situation did not last long, and the Visigothic elite were soon removed by Arab-Berber armies. The terms of Arab rule were famously benign. At the same time that mujahids spread their faith, they expanded the scope of sharia, and thus of the property relations (muamalat) developed by desert semi-nomads, which were incompatible with large, slave-worked plantations. Arab elites took control of municipal governments, and Berber soldiers broke up many latifundia for redistribution in order to work it themselves. Christian peasants were as free as they had ever been; prior slaves and coloni became small-holders and artisans. Still, the jizya – a rather efficient, if still extremely extractive, form of ethnic exploitation – stung, served as a rallying point for resistance, and again the situation did not last. Charlemagne soon pushed onto the peninsula, incorporating the trans-Pyrenees into his empire, and establishing the Marca Hispánica as a buffer-zone. Charlemagne’s empire would soon crumble as well, but the state building project he initiated finally stabilized the political economy of the region for a time. This stabilization proved to simultaneously be the most dynamic economic formation the region had ever seen, as well as to contain the seeds of Catalan autonomy. While the rest of the peninsula would remain stalled in the morass of the slow Reconquista, Catalonia’s early inclusion in the Frankish empire accelerated its economic development.

3

Charlemagne’s pretentions to revive the old empire – consummated by the union of Church and state with Leo III’s coronation – by a typical inversion, signified the real beginning of a new mode of production: feudalism. He expanded the bureaucracy with the help of the church in the form of missi dominici. More significant for the Catalan story was the centrally administered grid of special organization he imposed. In an attempt to revive the Roman civitatus, Charlemagne created the county, including in 801 the County of Barcelona. The Count of Barcelona, almost certainly a Visigoth, was an agent of the king responsible for administering the region’s justice – the only real political function of the state under feudalism – and for providing soldiers when called. More significant than the likelihood of Berà having descended from Visigothic lines, however, is that this is not known. By the 800s, after three centuries of close cultural proximity, and nearly a century of Arab rule, the German and Latin vulgates had merged and mutated into a new language, Catalan, aware of itself as distinct from French to the north, Spanish to the south, Latin in the churches, and German and Arabic in the law for perhaps the first time in this period.

As Charlemagne’s children squabbled after his death, unable to either unify their kingdom or independently defend their vassals from the invading Maygars, feudal agents became stronger vis-a-vis the crown, building castles for protection without permission and demanding hereditary status for their titles. The Count of Barcelona won this for his clan in the 870’s, and the House of Barcelona ruled the region for the next seven centuries. It was during this period that feudalism became a fully coherent mode of production. The hereditary comital system combined oaths of loyalty and the beneficence in a pyramid structure, extending from the Frankish emperor at the top to the Count of Barcelona’s own knights and vassals below. The House of Barcelona ruled Catalonia until 1410.

Indeed, the House extended its influence far into the peninsula, beginning in 1137 when the Count married the Queen of Aragon, creating the Crown of Aragon, binding his two titles and securing political autonomy for Catalonia in the process. This was the historical beginning of both Catalonia’s economic ascent to leading role on the peninsula, as well as its hypertrophied jealousy for autonomy. Aragon, the most powerful kingdom on the peninsula militarily, had been landlocked; with newfound access to the Mediterranean, the aristocracy began to look east. Pirates were cleared from the sea and urbanization accelerated. It is from this time that Valencia became an important node in the region’s expanding commercial network. With the conquest of Sardinia and Sicily, Catalonia became more than the metaphorical economic the center of the Empire. With the rise of urban production for the Mediterranean came a small but class conscious bourgeoisie. Enserfment of the peasants proceeded apace; simultaneous with this degradation was the empowerment of a more ambitious aristocratic class. In one of the earlier parliaments to appear in Europe, the circle of informal Catalan advisers to the crown declared itself a cortes with the authority to veto royal tax provisions in 1283, and established itself with permanent representation in 1359, a unique feature at the time.

Martin the Elder (d. 1410), the last Count from the House of Barcelona, was unable to secure a male heir. A violent dust-up over succession ensued, and Ferdinand – a Castilian – was rebaptized an Aragonese as a compromise with the surrounding kingdoms and the Aragonese aristocracy. This compact had to be imposed on an unhappy Generalitat, wary of the loss of a Catalan wearing the crown; it grudgingly assented once it was made clear that its autonomy would be respected – laws, customs, religion, language, and tax collection would all remain the prerogatives of local aristocrats. The ruling class, despite the loss of ethnic representation at the top, remained sufficiently powerful on the ground to be content.

4

The latter half of the fifteenth century saw a series of developments which had a complex, ironic character for both Catalonia and Spain as a whole. The dramatic, dialectical tension between serf and landlord, and between town and country was on full display.

Beginning in 1462, Catalonia was the theatre for a ten-year peasant rebellion backed by the Barcelona bourgeois; this was its local instantiation of the general crisis of feudalism of the late medieval period. The remença rebellion was only ended in 1486 by the Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe, freeing the serfs for a nominal payment on their part. The general crisis of feudalism succeeded in ending de facto serfdom in large swaths of Western Europe, including Catalonia; yet formal, universal, de jure emancipation had to wait another century in England, three in France, and four in Russia. Catalans, as the bleeding edge of this longer process, were justifiably proud of their achievement; the cultural memory of peasant freedom sustained a more general sentiment that Catalonia was a land of independence, individually and collectively.

At the same time as economic conditions formally improved for certain classes, national horizons darkened. In 1469 Ferdinand married Isabel of Castille and united the crowns. With the discovery of America there was a shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and a subsequent decline in the overall Catalan economy. However, the shift to the Atlantic was, in Spain, primarily based on a direct exploitation of natives and the importation of gold, not the development of a sustainable commerce or productive capacity. The gold and slaves that the Spanish crown found in the New World determined the next century and a half of the nation’s political economy; but the more urbanized east, and Catalonia in particular, with its more developed artisanal labor and proto-industrial production, lay in wait.

Despite the new Iberian centralism of the united crowns, the two royal heads remained distinct. Castile owned the New World. The Castilian monarch grew fat off its newly exploitable property, and built a highly centralized bureaucracy to administer all of its territories — including those at home. Aragon, however, was both handicapped by its lack of access to New World riches and by the historic strength of Catalan autonomy. In 1481, Spanish courts reaffirmed the submission of royal power to the Generalitat, despite the new union, after attempts at centralization and increased taxation met resistance; the Generalitat would remain autonomous. As a result, the kingdom of Aragon, united with but administratively separate from the kingdom of Castile, would remain fragmented. As the general political economy of Western Europe passed from feudalism to absolutism, the relative lack of coherence of Aragon’s structures acted as a constraint on growth.

With unprecedented access to the gold of the new world, the Spanish Crown was the undisputed political, military, and economic power on the continent. Successive monarchs succeeded in imposing their will on neighboring countries in a series of escalating wars of aggression. By the time of Philip II, New World exploitation had to run its course; the mines of Potosi and the native population had been exhausted. To continue the process of imperial aggrandizement, greater exploitation of the Aragonese possessions would be required. Philip II’s political power was sufficient to impose greater levels of taxation on a declining Catalonian aristocracy. Philip IV, however, unsatisfied with his predecessor’s fiscal extractions, pushed for further centralization of administration — including a merging of the Spanish Cortes with the Generalitat — to streamline police. In 1641, in response, Catalan aristocrats joined with rising bourgeois elements to declare itself a Republic under the protection of France. It was crushed within a decade; but the Franco-Spanish war only came to a halt in 1659. The treaty ceded cis-Pyrenees Catalonia to France. The Republic resoundingly stomped, the extensive historical rights of trans-Pyrenees Catalonia were fully recognized by the Spanish; this was an outcome dictated by France, not out of benevolence, but from the knowledge that this would continue to hobble the development of Spanish absolutism, and thus continue to check Spanish aggression. From this point on, the trajectory of Catalonia diverged significantly on either size of the Pyrenees. The cis-Pyrenees, grateful for France’s support of the republic, quietly settled into the rhythms of French life, until Napoleonic state building and national schooling systems were successfully imposed on the population, evicting Catalonia’s language in favor of a newly standardized French. In Spain, the trans-Pyrenees Catalans experienced an economic recovery as the Spanish Atlantic went into relative decline. The rise of the Ottoman Empire also served to stabilize relations between the Christian and Islamic worlds, further adding to the ability of Catalan commerce and manufacture to pursue growth through Mediterranean exports. This general rebalancing of demand and production tipped the Spanish scales of power in favor of Catalan upper classes, but national stagnation meant that even with this recalibration, the contradictions of political economy and ethnic relations remained muted, sublimated into a more general concern for the declining place of the Spanish empire in the increasingly competitive world of inter-imperial competition.

When the War of Spanish succession erupted. Catalonia initially accepted Philip V of the Bourbon dynasty; in exchange, Philip continued to recognize their rights and Generalitat fiscal powers; he added the carrot of an independent judicial system, and Barcelona as a freeport that could trade with America (a right historically restricted to Castilian Seville). However, with the invasion of Habsburg forces, the Generalitat betrayed the Bourbons, despite which Philip won the war. As punishment he dissolved the Generalitat, suppressed their universities, and outlawed the administrative use of the Catalan language. Catalonia had come a long way since Charlemagne. From local, comital rule and feudalism, Catalan aristocrats captured the Aragonese crown and used it to become the center of a small Mediterranean empire; casting off the shackles of feudalism coincided with a shift from the Mediterranian basin to the Atlantic, and a simultaneous transfer of power at the top from Catalan to Castilian dynasties. When the Spanish crown’s dream of universal empire stalled and other continental powers checked its expansion, Catalonia was first divided and then suppressed. This is the historical origin of the Catalan independence movement.

5

The failure of Spanish absolutism to centralize and homogenize its territorial administration — the result of its over confidence in its ability to exploit New World wealth, as well as the successful demands for autonomy and independence from Catalonia’s historically strong aristocratic and peasant classes, respectively — meant a declining position for it in the global division of labor. Spain remained an economic backwater for most of the eighteenth century, culminating in the rapid loss of its last American possessions in the early nineteenth. Schemes for liberalization and modernization, which rose in popularity from the middle of the nineteenth century, were associated with Isabelle II and Castilian centralism; naturally, Catalonia overwhelmingly supported her opponent in contests over the royal succession. The extravagantly Catholic Carl ultimately lost, giving Catalan politics a conservative flavor it had heretofore not possessed. Against Catalonia’s will, Spain liberalized – this involved low tariffs, a gold standard, elimination of internal barriers to trade, and state sponsorship of transportation infrastructure and industry. As the leading industrial and urban section of the country, these transformations reshaped Catalonia with the greatest intensity, producing a wave of proletarianization in the region. With the betrayal of 1713 far enough in historical memory and a cautiously liberal attitude restraining the crown’s hand, the state refrained from repressing a the late nineteenth century growth of a Catalan nationalist movement that focused mainly on the recovery of poetry, folk stories, food, and dance. Sponsored by the bourgeoisie, the nationalist ferment affected all classes. The growing proletarian mass, dispossessed and increasingly exploited, saw value in Catalonia’s glorious history of independence and autonomy; it was further buoyed by the First International’s penetration into Spain, and the spread of anarchist philosophy among the workers. The aristocracy indulged in historical fantasies about its golden age, and imagined a republican revival in Catalonia in which it was still hegemonic. By beginning of the twentieth century, these artistic and workers movements had coalesced into the Regionalist League. After a series of devastating strikes, the League successfully petitioned the central government for autonomy; in 1913 Catalonia was granted partial self-government in the form of a Commonwealth, which had limited power to tax and sponsor infrastructure and cultural activities.

6

At the same time, the workers movement was accelerating. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), founded in Barcelona in 1910 as a more radical, more libertarian alternative to the Unión General de Trabajadores (f. 1888), quickly grew to national prominence. Despite being outlawed by the courts, CNT surpassed UGT membership by the later 1910’s. At their height, the two each controlled two million workers in a country of 20 million – an unprecedented level of unionization in the West. The two worked together to achieve Europe’s first eight hour workday, with peninsula-wide strikes; but with the abdication of the Bourbon monarchy in 1920 and the appointment of dictator Primo de Rivera, the two organizations again diverged. Rivera outlawed all unions except his own state-sponsored organization. UGT took an accommodationist line; it lost members to the CNT, which organized the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI, f. 1927), a federated network of anarchist paramilitary unions, to protest the dictatorship and demand better working conditions. De Rivera, who identified anarchism with Catalonia with only partial justice, went to war with the CNT-FAI. Catalonia was the home for Spanish anarchism and CNT-FAI strength was a gradient declining from Barcelona to the south-west; but CNT-FAI membership was nationwide. When suppressing CNT failed to eliminate worker demands for Catalan autonomy, de Rivera dissolved Catalonia’s Commonwealth.

7

Under the Spanish Republic (1931-1936 [1939]), the Generalitat declared itself autonomous, a declaration later confirmed by the Spanish Cortes by statue in 1932. During the Republic, labor radicalized still further. The CNT-FAI remained strong in Catalonia; the Trotskyist POUM (f. 1935) and Stalinist PSUC (f. 1936) attempted to piggyback off of that success, but quickly realized that libertarian attitudes would take time to overcome, so the communists refocused their attention to Madrid and the south. Franco’s surprise coup in 1936 swept the western quarter of the country in less than a day. The Spanish prime minister, unable to trust the army or the military police, nevertheless hesitated to accept the offer by CNT-FAI and UGT leaders to mobilize workers to fight Franco’s army. Overnight, as one prime minister resigned in distress after another, the fourth PM finally gave the order to arm the workers; in the meantime, half of the country had fallen. Workers held off the fascist advance for three years. In the end, Franco’s international support from capitalists in Italy and Germany ultimately overwhelmed Catalan labor. British, French, and American governments were unable to summon the moral conviction to intervene. The International Brigades, still a glorious symbol of international proletarian solidarity, were a poor match for Franco’s professionally trained military. And, ultimately, communist factions were divided in purpose; on the one hand, they opposed Franco; on the other, they were committed to coming out on top of leftist-infighting — for Stalinists, losing Spain to libertarian socialists was worse than losing it to fascists, as the former were an internal, ideological threat, while the latter would pose merely a weak, external antagonist. When Franco took Catalonia in 1938, his suppression of Catalan culture was complete. The cosmopolitan institutions of capital — banks, firms, chambers of commerce — quickly made their peace with the new regime. Those of the people — unions, their mother tongue, artistic movements — could not.

8

Under Franco, politics were relatively quiet in Catalonia. This was not the case in the Basque country, an area whose history we have not had time or space to explore here in-depth. Unlike Catalan, which is the linguistic synthesis of Vulgar Latin and German, Basque is not even an Indo-European language. The Basque’s response to oppression by the Franco regime was terrorism; extremism and the willingness to use violence, ineffective against the dictator, gave that nation a better hand to play when Franco died in 1975. That year the Generalitat again summoned itself into existence, again was composed largely of bourgeois elements, petite and otherwise, and again had its self-assertions condescendingly declared retrospectively appropriate by a central constitutional settlement. The Spanish Constitution was built on the pillars of local autonomy, capitalism, and monarchy. The Catalan statute of autonomy provided more autonomy in the realms of culture, justice and police than the 1932 statute, specifically recognizing Catalonia as a “nation.” But the Generalitat has few legislative prerogatives. This is in stark contrast to the Basque country, which has a wider range of legislative action and — more importantly — unlike the other fifteen autonomous regions in Spain, retains almost all of the tax revenue produced within its borders. Catalonia, meanwhile, routinely sends more money to Madrid than it receives in transfers or spending on infrastructure.

The center-right Jordi Pujol i Soley, leader of the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) from 1974 to 2003, and president of the Generalitat from 1980 to 2003, struck an accomidationist pose towards the new regime, and made no objections to the neoliberal order pursued in Madrid, and later in Brussels. The Cortes Generales, meanwhile, was content to let Catalonia alone as long as it kept net-positive tax-and-transfer payments coming in. This bargain – cash for cultural autonomy – was what saw Spain through the EU negotiations, and saw the adoption of unregulated capital flows and the abdication of national monetary policy.

The CDC failed to obtain a plurality in 2003, allowing a left coalition for the first time in Catalonia’s history; in 2006 it passed a new Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia; the Spanish High Court invalidated the most radical elements of the statue in 2010, on the grounds that only the Madrid Cortes had the right to issue such a statue. In the context of global economic catastrophe — a crisis of accumulation that hit Spain especially hard — the court decision easily led to protests in the streets. In January 2013, as anger towards Madrid and Brussels grew in Barcelona, the Catalonia parliament, once again controlled by the CDC, voted to put an independence referendum to the people. The vote took place in November 2014; 80% (1.6m) voted for independence, with a voter turnout out of 2.25 million, out of a possible 5.4 million (41.2%).

9

The Generalitat has once again posed the question of independence to the Catalan people, and the vote has once again returned in the affirmative. As Madrid’s oppressive measures grow more authoritarian by the day, as corporations and banks leave Barcelona for fear of successful secession, as workers gather in the streets to protest centralized neoliberalism’s control over their lives, the situation poses thorny questions to outside observers.

The first is the principle of succession. In the American context, the political consensus has long been that semi-autonomous regions cannot vote themselves out of a Constitutional arrangement — that option has too often been associated with slave racial capitalism for it to warrant anything but contempt from the contemporary left. We in America lack a well worked out theory of self-determination in the context of a bourgeois democracy. The Marxist answer — that self-determination is an essential prerequisite for justice, both inherently and because it ‘clears the deck’ for a properly pure labor-capital dialectic, one not over-determined by racial ideology, to play itself out into a proletarian revolution — is limited here. The first reason, of course, is that there is no such thing as the pure labor-capital dialectic — this contradiction, however central to a social formation, is always over-determined by racial ideology, regardless of the ethnic homogeneity of the nation concerned; racial ideology is global, and there is no outside to it. Second is a challenge internal to Western (ie White) Marxism. This referendum has been put forward by the Catalan right, which represents the Catalan middle classes and has always been comfortable, if not enthusiastic, with neoliberalism. On what basis can one seriously believe that an independent Catalonia would be anything other than a hyper-capitalist hellscape? There are in fact three reasons. First, the Catalan political scene has an Overton window further to the left than most political spaces. Among other successes of the Catalan left include a universal basic income, banning evictions from vacant houses, prohibition on immigrant detention centers, and the banning of rubber bullets by police. Indeed, even regional security forces have historically been able to play a progressive role in Catalan society — the local police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, refused to cooperate in anti-independence actions like sealing off voting centers, arresting politicians, and raiding the corporate offices of ballot printing companies. All of this during the nearly uninterrupted forty year reign of the center-right CDC. Second, corporations and banks are flighty — many have already rechartered in Madrid or elsewhere for fear that Catalonia might succeed in gaining independence. This may simply be due to the rational expectation that the EU reaction to Catalan independence, and the bureaucratic nightmare that implies for corporations, would be severe; still, the shrill tenor of their protests suggest something more — perhaps the expectation of more stringent demand from labor? Third, universal support for independence on the Catalan left is not matched by the same level of commitment on the right; one assumes that in the event of a successful bid for independence the prerogatives of supporters will carry more weight than those reluctant nay-sayers. It is admittedly difficult to forecast what the prospects for an independent Catalonian left would be, but on balance there are reasons for optimism.

Then there are problems of praxis. The (now former) President of Catalonia, Charles Puigdemont, has been meek, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory were it not for the even more incompetent Spanish PM, Mariano Rajoy. What Rajoy fails to understand is that, when asked by pollsters, 70% of Catalans wanted the ability to vote on independence, while only 40% supported independence itself. That is, suppressing the vote was the worst course of action — it merely fueled secessionist sentiments, while ensuring that only pro-independence voters got to the polls, ironically guaranteeing that the outcome of the vote would be both undemocratic and the opposite of his own position. Yet in the face of this gift, Puigdemont has prevaricated, issued vague pronouncements, failed to rally popular support one way or another, and ultimately let himself get arrested. Thus outside observers are confronted with the unanswerable question: what would independence look like? Few proposals are on the table; none have much support. Along with this failure on the level of Catalan politics to articulate a clear vision for independence, there is the national issue. Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP) is willing to use authoritarian measures to suppress any independence referendum; the center-left PSOE, the PP’s sometime coalition partner, is willing to go along. These two parties have dominated Spanish politics since 1978. Yet the global financial crisis has seen the rise of the far-left Podemos, which has always been anti-independence — in part because of the support they derive from Catalonia’s leftist political leanings — came out in favor of a referendum the week before it took place. Why? PSOE has been moving left recently, in an attempt to stop the bleeding of its membership rolls as voters, furious that socialists have let neoliberalism persist for so long, even after the crisis, defect to Podemos. But as the PSOE drifts left, Podemos must invent reasons to avoid forming a coalition; it is still a party on the rise, and taking power too soon, especially with an ally that many think is older, more technically competent, more reliable and experienced, and perhaps not very different in terms of politics, would prove disastrous. Hence it has endorsed a referendum and made this the condition of any alliance with PSOE, a condition it well knows is unacceptable. Media sneering at Podemos’ cynicism has missed the point: in addition to trying to forecast the landscape of Catalonian politics post-independence with an eye toward the dignity and welfare of Catalonian workers, the same procedure must be for Spain at large. What does Spain look like without Catalonia? The lost revenue is not trivial; the meagre and evaporating Spanish welfare state will feel its loss. More important is the strong history of libertarian socialism the Catalonia represents. The loss of this force in Spain’s national politics would be devastating. Even proposals for independence that take the form of a “federated” nation within a nation would deprive Podemos, potentially the most radical element of the European scene since Syriza’s failure in Greece, of crucial support. At a time when global neoliberalism is restructuring, and nationalism bids to be its replacement, the loss of support for a party like Podemos is simply unacceptable for the contemporary international left.

The final determinant that needs consideration in any question of Catalan independence is the European question. Merkel, Macron, and Juncker have all made it clear that they support Rajoy. Any attempt to leave Spain, even to achieve federated nation status, would require EU acknowledgement, something that will not be forthcoming. Neither the domestic politics of the large European states nor the logic of the Eurozone will allow it. If member states begin leaving the European Union and escaped the fiscal, monetary, regulatory straitjacket it imposed, the prospect of a cascading series of exits looms. The EU itself has every incentive to punish those that leave, in an effort to prevent further territorial los. Further, the domestic success of leaders like Merkel has rested on playing up cultural perceptions of southern Europe as lazy, irresponsible, short-sighted, and in need of professional paternalism. Thus the Greeks, the Italians, and the Spanish have all been reanimated in the form of nineteenth century racist guises in the minds of French, German, and British voters. This simply reaffirms the always-already over-determining nature of racial ideology under racial capitalism.

Despite the range of forces arrayed against Catalonia’s independence – continental, national, local; ideological, structural – the desire for Independence will not leave the Catalan people. It is too deeply rooted in their history, and in the history of racial capitalism that has always extracted surplus value from them, profiting from their labor while suppressing their identity. To secure the right to determine their cultural and economic life for themselves, the Catalan people must be independent. Those on the left must imagine alternative versions of accumulation beyond the horizons of contemporary possibility.

10

Catalonia ought to declare itself part of a federated nation, sovereign in its own right in its relations with the rest of Spain, yet facing the outside world from the perspective of the federated Spanish state. Catalonia already has control of its own cultural institutions; they know who they are and what they want, and they have been fearless in expressing both. Now Catalans need control their own fiscal and monetary policies. This will entail leaving the EU, and thus reforming Spain as well as Catalonia. Catalan workers must do this not just on behalf of themselves, but on behalf of Spain and Europe’s southern proletariat. The Euro has proven to be a straightjacket — Germany demands control of inflation and debt at the cost of a Spanish unemployment rate above 17% for nearly a decade; it constructs images of lazy, Mediterranean bodies, piling up debt to understand and justify its cruelty. Attempts at continental fiscal union have failed, and with the rise of right-wing nationalism, prospects for further developments on this front are grim. In the spirit of internationalism, the left must endorse national self-determination for Catalonia, and hope that the worst fears of EU boosters about a cascading series of exits are true. Podemos has not yet been able to revoke the Treaty of Lisbon, but if Catalonia successfully declares itself part of a federated nation, outside the EU, the national left in Spain could hitch a ride, and liberate itself from the chains of its own racial capitalism.