Euskadi (the Basque Country) and Catalonia have been in the vanguard of the recent upsurge of struggles by the minority nationalities of Western Europe. As yet, however, no analysis has appeared in English, either of the history of these national struggles or of their theoretical implications. This article is an attempt to begin such an analysis within the context of the debate on nationalism opened by Alan Freeman's article in the last issue of International. As such it has a dual focus: firstly to provide information and analysis on the specific history of Euskadi and Catalonia (unfortunately only of the national movements themselves — a history of the workers' movement would require another article in itself); and secondly to situate them in the context of the theoretical questions raised by Freeman's article.
Freeman's article was a welcome start to a debate on the question of the Western European national minorities. Quite apart from the excellent material on the relationship of the democratic and socialist tasks of the revolution and on workers' democracy, he presents an analysis of the formation of the European states with which I largely agree. I wish to emphasise this general area of agreement because I nevertheless believe that the formation of the Spanish state falls outside the schema which Freeman constructs.
One final note: this article deals not with the national question within the Spanish state as a whole but specifically with Catalonia and Euskadi. This is because I consider that the national movement in Galicia and national/regional aspirations in Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Andalusia and an increasing number of regions are typologically distinct from the movements in Euskadi and Catalonia. Consequently they fall more readily into the general pattern of Western European national and regional movements.
1. The National Question and the Spanish State
Marxists and the nation
In his pamphlet Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, written in 1913, Stalin made his celebrated definition of the nation as: 'A historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up, manifested in a community of culture,'
This pamphlet — and this definition of the nation — has generally been accepted as a definitive statement of the Bolshevik position. In his biography of Stalin, Trotsky suggested that the work had been ghosted by Lenin since it was 'the only piece of serious Marxist writing Stalin had ever contributed to the arsenal of Bolshevik theory'. [1] Even today Stalin's work is quoted approvingly in the literature of the Fourth International. [2] In several crucial respects, however, this pamphlet does not correspond to the Leninist position. For example, there is no distinction made between the nationalism of the oppressed and oppressor nations, the right to unification of 'non-territorial' nations is denied, and so on. [3] For the purpose of this article I will confine my critique to some comments on the question of the definition of the nation to show that it is from the Leninist, rather than the Stalinist position that the correct tactics for the national struggle can be deduced.
Lenin never laid down any dogmatic criteria for the formation of a national state. He specifically distanced himself from Engels' conception of 'non-historic' nations which is mirrored in the quotation from Stalin. He criticised Rosa Luxemburg for her economism in maintaining that because Poland was economically unified with Russia no political independence was possible. He polemicised most fiercely against the Austro-Marxists' psychological conception of the national character which substituted 'cultural-national autonomy' for the right to self-determination. Yet all these errors appear in Stalin's formulation which has been maintained by much of the Trotskyist movement.
For Stalin — as for Engels — there are a series of characteristics which have to have been 'historically evolved' before a nation qualifies for self-determination. Otto Bauer, in one of his more enlightened moments, remarked to the effect that a nation (like the Czechs) which had not had a history did not necessarily have no future. Stalin's definition, on the other hand, encompasses the positions of both Luxemburg and the Austro-Marxists by laying down economic and 'psychological' criteria for self-determination and establishing a territorial criterion which Lenin specifically argued against. [4] The irony is that not only do the Western European minorities not match up to Stalin's criteria, but neither do many of the Eastern European nations with which he was concerned!
The crucial point is that national oppression, which is primarily political in character, is designed precisely to prevent the evolution of a 'stable community' of national activity. What differentiated Lenin from all his critics, both left and right, prior to 1917 was that he situated national oppression at a relatively autonomous political level and saw the central question as the denial of the right to form a state. To erect a set of inflexible, ahistorical criteria, and thus deny the relative autonomy of this question from considerations of economic dependence, cultural aspiration and so on, is to run directly counter to the positions developed by Lenin.
Ortzi, in his book on Basque nationalism, argues that 'the nation is not an essence but . . . a social praxis'. [5] Although I do not accept Ortzi's argument in its totality, this would seem to be a good working definition. It is necessary to avoid the subjectivism of the Catalan, Ventura Gassol — 'We are Catalans because we want to be' [6] — but at the same time we must supplement long-term historical criteria with considerations such as the existence of a national political movement and a national political consciousness. To take a concrete example, Euskadi has a clear territorial identity but its language is spoken by less than half the population and its entire economic life is bound up with the Spanish state as a whole. Yet Euskadi exists as a social praxis, as a political framework for the activities of various classes whether or not they adhere to the nationalist movement. It is this which leads socialists to defend the political-democratic right to self-determination of the Basque people, completely distinctly from any question of cultural or economic autonomy.
Finally, a point which will be developed later. It is only by maintaining such a flexible definition of the nation and by insisting on the relatively autonomous political character of the right to self-determination that a distinction can be made between support for that right and support for the ideology and political formations of nationalism. Any 'psychological' definition of the nation, like Stalin's, must eventually return to the problematic of Bauer and the Austro-Marxists (and, curiously, of Luxemburg) who defined the nation in cultural terms and were thus able to sacrifice the right to self-determination on the altar of cultural-national autonomy. It is a paradox, but nevertheless true, that this apparently complete understanding of the character of the national oppression should entail the denial of the democratic rights of the oppressed nation.
Euskadi, Catalonia & the Spanish State
The first bourgeoisies to establish national market states — the British and the French — had a clear relationship to the small and generally underdeveloped minority nationalities which stood in their way. Alan Freeman quite correctly points to 'the brutal suppression of minority languages and culture'. Thus the integration of Scotland into the United Kingdom followed closely upon the revolution of 1688, while the capture of state power in France in 1789 heralded a period of the suppression of national minorities. This was greatly assisted by the defection of the incipient minority national bourgeoisies to the side of the state. Yet these national unifications took place in a qualitatively earlier period than the formation of the other large European bourgeois states. Germany, Italy and Spain only consummated their union in the second half of the nineteenth century when the ascent of the industrial bourgeoisie was well under way. In Germany and Italy this was achieved under the impetus of the most dynamic sections of the bourgeoisie forcing unification: in Germany the military-agrarian capitalism of Prussia, in Italy the industrial capitalism of Piedmont.
In Spain, however, the situation was more complex. Unlike Germany and Italy the differences within the state were of a more national than regional character. For example, there was no language common to all the Iberian peoples. Most importantly, the driving force in the bourgeois revolution in Spain did not correspond to the political and administrative centre of the old absolutist state. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was only Catalonia which had an industrial bourgeoisie on the European model. By the second half of the century it was joined by the Basque bourgeoisie. As Freeman points out, the formation of the minority nationalities was primarily a function of mercantile capital. [7] However, in Spain, unlike most other countries of Western Europe, the formation of industrial capital corresponds geographically to the centres of mercantile capital. For example, in Euskadi the early stages of the accumulation of capital were based upon land rents and seaborne trade (primarily with Britain) subsequently augmented by the export of iron ore. The economy built upon this accumulation was entirely externally oriented. Thus the iron and steel industry was developed through the import of English carbon rather than that of neighbouring Oviedo, Leon and Palencia. From the beginning, the Basque industrialisation was characterised by the partnership of native and foreign companies in mining, iron and steel, railways and shipbuilding.
The Spanish state was therefore distinguished by the existence of at least three distinct industrial bourgeoisies within its boundaries — Euskadi, Catalonia and Madrid in an incipient form — each with its distinct rhythm of development. The Catalan bourgeoisie was built upon a manufacturing textile industry with aspirations which did not, for the moment, extend beyond its own borders, the Basque was expansive and potentially imperialist, while the Madrid bourgeoisie found its development closely tied to political vicissitudes and financial speculation at the administrative centre.
According to Freeman: 'Where the bourgeoisie faced an absolutist state, it prolonged its autonomous role for as long as it could and developed projects for separation and political autonomy: as with Catalonia, the Basque country, many nations of Great Russia and so on.' [8]
However the crucial question is not the absolutist character of the state, but the internal differentiation of the bourgeoisie on national lines and the central role played by the peripheral bourgeoisies in the execution of the bourgeois revolution. Thus the important question concerns the relative level of development of the bourgeois revolution in the minority nationality, although it must be admitted that this is at least partially connected with the entrenchment of an aristocracy and its ideology at the centre. But the comparison with Great Russia is an apt one, since, like the Ukraine, Catalonia and Euskadi are nations of a very different formation from Brittany, Occitanie, Wales and so on. In the latter cases the national struggle of recent years has been primarily a product of the contradiction between the level of wealth which they create for the central bourgeoisie and the relative impoverishment of the nation itself. In Catalonia and Euskadi, on the other hand, the national movement is rooted in their dominant role in the bourgeois revolution.
Freeman continues: '... what went on was a more or less convergent historical process, whose end result was a settled system of bourgeois states, but a system stabilised by the desertion of the bourgeoisies of the small nations and their fusion to form large, unified national blocks operating within the state boundaries of the West European powers, each containing within itself suppressed but not destroyed national communities and institutions.' (emphasis in original) [9]
But this is precisely what did not happen in the Spanish state. Freeman fails to distinguish between the different periods of the formation of bourgeois states and consequently ignores the fact that a 'settled ...... bourgeois state' has never been established in Spain. The relative underdevelopment of Spain and the industrial development of its peripheral nations posed an insuperable obstacle to this unification in anything other than a formal sense. It is true that Basque finance capital was subsequently integrated into the Spanish bourgeoisie and that the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was prepared to acquiesce in the rigidly unitary dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco. It is also true that the Lliga Regionalista, the party of the Catalan bourgeoisie, long held aspirations towards becoming the Spanish Piedmont and subordinating the Spanish state to itself. Nevertheless, during the period of the formation of the Spanish bourgeois state, there were irreconcilable contradictions within the bourgeoisie itself which guaranteed the impossibility of creating anything other than a multi-national state, not just in a latent, but in an actual sense. Just as it is not possible to talk about an undifferentiated 'Spanish' bourgeoisie, so too important distinctions must be made between the bourgeoisies of Euskadi and Catalonia. In Catalonia, as was pointed out, industrialisation came earlier than in Euskadi and on the basis of a textile industry organised primarily on manufacturing, as distinct from industrial, productive relations. The significance of this is that it provided a lasting impediment to the formation of a native Catalan finance capital. This is the central problem which faces the Catalan bourgeoisie up to the present day. At the turn of the century the dominance of the textile industry — 70% both of production and of capital invested — made it particularly vulnerable to the colonial defeats of 1898 and the crises of overproduction of 1900-01 and 1908-09. [10] The repatriation of capital from the colonies led to a diversification, but the most important of the new industries, for example hydro-electric power and railways, were owned by external capital. Under the Primo dictatorship of the 1920s, when the important Suria-Cardona potash deposits were opened up, this too was under the control of external capital. [11] Again, under Franco, credit was withheld from Catalan companies and the weak Catalan banking system crushed. The Borsi (Free Stock Market) in Barcelona was closed and the big Madrid banks — Hispano-Americano, Central and Espanol de Credito — took over about twenty Catalan banks. In 1970 Barcelona only constituted 18% of the Spanish stock market and all control of credit to Catalan industry lay in Madrid. [12]
In the years prior to 1936 this central problem of the non-formation of Catalan finance capital expressed itself firstly as regionalism, with protectionism as its main plank, and subsequently, through the Lliga Regionalista (later Lliga Catalana), as 'regenerationism', the moulding of the Spanish state to meet its requirements. Federalism was incorporated as a means of mobilising popular support for this project. Prat de la Riba, the principal theoretician of the Lliga, argued for the need to make Catalonia the Spanish Piedmont. This involved the expansion of the Catalan market to encompass firstly the Aragonese Confederation and later the entire Spanish state. Here was another attempt to set up the Spanish national market/state, but on the Italian model based in Barcelona rather than Madrid.
In Euskadi, on the other hand, development was based on an expansive capital goods industry which rapidly came under the control of finance capital. The two major Basque banks, the Banco de Vizcaya and the Banco de Bilbao, evolved into the strongest section of finance capital in the Spanish state. From the turn of the century, when Basque iron ore production was 13.25% of the total world production with 6 million tons in exports, the main characteristic of Basque capitalism was the export of capital both inside and outside the Spanish state. By the 1930s Basque finance capital owned 48% of all hydro-electric plants and 57% of production, all the big railways, the municipal transport of Madrid, Barcelona and other big cities, a controlling interest in the Valencia metal industries and so on, as well as a monopoly control of all Basque industry. Even when England cut down its imports of iron ore from Euskadi (from 65% in 1913) in favour of African deposits, the Basque banks benefited through their controlling interest in the African mines! [13]
This domination of finance capital found a direct political reflection which diverged significantly from the Catalan experience. Following the Carlist wars, the fueros, the traditional regional rights of Euskadi, were removed in 1876. This led to the formation of a fuerista party based upon the jauntxos, the displaced rural petty bourgeoisie, which differentiated itself from Carlist Traditionalism. The nascent Bilbao financial/industrial oligarchy latched onto this political opportunity to form a transigent fuerista lobby which demanded fiscal concessions unconnected with the original fueros. In the wake of a defeat inflicted by the Canovas government on the intransigent jauntxo deputies, the transigents were able to win the Conciertos Económicos for the provinces of Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya and Alava in 1878. These consisted of the right to free collection of taxes to an amount fixed by the central government which gave the oligarchy a free hand to discriminate against agricultural interests. By the 1890s the Bilbao oligarchy had moved on to support Canovas and the Castilian latifundist interest against the free trader Sagasta on the issue of protectionism. In Euskadi the intransigent fueristas organised anti-Sagasta demonstrations but also raised demands against the oligarchy to relieve the heavy taxation on agriculture. [14] Henceforth Basque monopoly and finance capital aligned itself fully with the politics of the central government, while the leadership of the national movement devolved upon the displaced, non-monopoly section of the industrial and rural bourgeoisie.
2. The National Movements in Euskadi and Catalonia
The Formation of the National Movements
The first theoretical statement of Basque nationalism was made by Sabino Arana Goiri, the son of a wooden-ship builder and Carlist, displaced by the development of the steel industry. His politics coincided completely with Carlism except in his opposition to their fuerista position. For Sabino Arana, the Carlist fueros were not traditional but a liberal Spanish concession. Instead he advocated a return to the pre-1839 ancient laws which applied to each of the four 'Spanish' Basque provinces. Race was the crucial component of the nation (the Basques were racially superior to the Spanish) and language the essential preservative factor. The class struggle was an unpleasant Spanish invention not native to Euskadi. His religious position was Traditionalist (Carlist) but he argued for the separation of Church and State with the ultimate subordination of the latter to the former: 'Nosotros para Euskadi, y Euskadi para Dios.' [15] ('We are for Euskadi and Euskadi for God.') It was Sabino Arana who invented the Basque flag. It was even he who invented the name Euskadi in preference to Euskal-herria (the Basque people) used by the Carlists. He set his face against the unholy trinity of Catalanism, which he denounced as espanolista, big capital and socialism.
In Catalonia the initial impulse for the national movement came from the dominant, non-monopoly section of the bourgeoisie, for the reasons already discussed. The ideology of the Lliga was sharply distinguished from that of Sabinian Basque nationalism by its regenerationist aspirations. Although the Lliga itself never fully discarded Traditionalism, the Catalan movement outgrew its Carlist origins more easily than the Basque. In Euskadi Carlism was the political expression of a wealthy, conservative peasantry. In Catalonia it was far more related to radical peasant unrest in the impoverished inland areas, which bore little correspondence with a movement of the bourgeoisie and landlords. [16]
A position which situated the national question on the level of the Spanish state was alien to pure Sabinian nationalism. But 1898 had its effects in Euskadi as well. It signalled the turn of a significant proportion of the industrial non-monopoly bourgeoisie towards Basque nationalism. This required a re-orientation on the part of the nationalists, consummated by Sabino Arana's last theoretical contribution before his death in 1903. He called for the formation of a nationalist party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco — PNV) to fight for autonomy within the Spanish state: 'The fatherland demands that we become espanolistas'. [17] Nevertheless, the formation of the PNV did not end the antagonisms of these two distinct social strata: the petty rural aristocracy and the middle bourgeoisie. Increasingly a distinction arose between the puros — the separatist jauntxos — and the collaborationists — the regenerationist bourgeoisie. The latter, like the Lliga, supported the regenerationist government of Maura and grew closer to the liberal section of the financial oligarchy.
The boom of the war years benefitted both Basque and Catalan capital. The auxiliary industries of Euskadi upon which Basque nationalism was based shared in the profits of increased iron and steel exports. The Catalan export of cotton fabrics increased from 5,400 tons in 1914 to 17,300 tons the following year [19] This gave a corresponding boost to the regenerationist tendency in each country. The Lliga won the Mancomunitat in 1914. This was nothing more than the amalgamation of the four provincial councils of Catalonia, but represented the full extent of the Lliga's autonomist aspirations. Similarly the Basque collaborationists (Comunión Nacionalista) formulated a minimum programme modelled on the Mancomunitat, which precipitated the split of the puros, led by Sabino Arana's brother Luis.
However, two [illegible] demise [illegible] regenerationism as the central thrust of the national movements. The first was the crisis of 1917. The massive price rises on the world market which had facilitated the boom in industrial exports also found a reflection within Spanish agriculture, giving rise to a sharp inflationary spiral. The crisis came to a head in 1917 under the dual pressure of the German blockade and the impact of the Russian Revolution on the working class. The military Juntas de Defensa threatened a right-wing coup and their demands were accepted by the government. The Lliga supported demands from an Assembly of Parliamentarians for a Constituent Cortes and Catalan autonomy. Similarly the Comunión Nacionalista broke with its regenerationism and put forward its maximum programme of separation. But the Lliga pulled back from the brink when the united front of the anarchists (CNT) and the socialists (UGT) mounted a general strike on the demand for a Constituent Cortes. Cambé, the Lliga leader, took the unprecedented step of entering the government and supporting the repression. Another general strike in 1919 brought about a three year state of exception in Barcelona. The Lliga participated in the Somatent, a scab militia, and formed a yellow union, the Sindicato Libre, to perform strike-breaking functions.
The reaction of the Basque movement differed in that its break with regenerationism was permanent. Its attitude to the working class was more ambiguous since it, unlike the Lliga, counted on a significant proletarian vote. In Catalonia the immigration was easily integrated into the native working class for a number of reasons. Catalan is more widely spoken than Euskera and is relatively easy to learn. Indeed, the ideology of Catalan nationalism was a more genuine popular development than Basque nationalism, which went to great pains to invent the traditions which it supposedly represented. [19] But above all, in the anarcho-syndicalist CNT the Catalan and immigrant working class had an organisation which corresponded exactly to the needs of workers in small units of production and which was able to integrate the aspirations of the two sectors. Hence the Lliga was never able to mobilise significant working class support.
The PNV/Comunión Nacionalista, on the other hand, was able to capitalise on the rapid formation of the Basque working class from the native peasantry and Spanish immigrants, through its yellow union, the Solidaridad de Obreros Vascos (SOV). A section of the native working class, recently uprooted from its Carlist peasant origins, was very susceptible to an ideology which transposed its traditional beliefs onto a modern, industrial setting, via support for the medium and petty bourgeoisie. Although the PSOE (Socialist Party) maintained its hegemony in the Basque working class as a whole, the exacerbation of this racial division, particularly among tenant farmers who became day workers, frustrated unity at the base of the workers movement for a long period. Indeed the failure of the PSOE to recognise the democratic national demands of the Basque workers left the way open for the PNV to capitalise on this aristocracy of labour mentality.
The second factor which pushed the nationalist movements decisively away from regenerationism was the emergence of a new social stratum which provided a base for those movements. In Euskadi in particular, the need for increased consumption led to the 'growth of the tertiary sector and of the bureaucracies of the state and of the monopolies. The functionaries of these sectors, the new middle classes, constituted a significant new base for the nationalist parties. Whereas in Italy and Germany, and in Spain itself, the intermediate layers of the peasantry, petty bourgeoisie and white-collar workers provided the mass base for radical reaction on a nationalist programme, in Euskadi and Catalonia such layers evolved a nationalism which was forced to differentiate itself from the reactionary aspirations of the central bourgeoisie, and ultimately to align itself with the anti-fascist forces. The impetus for such a radicalisation came primarily not from the traditionally conservative peasantry and petty bourgeoisie but from the new middle class. In Euskadi the PNV regrouped around a separatist programme in 1921. In 1930 it fused with the Comunión Nacionalista again on a compromise programme which abandoned both regenerationism and immediate separatism, adopting a gradualist, autonomist line.
In Catalonia similar developments took place, but the role of the Lliga as the representative of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie necessitated an organisational break. The Lliga continued its orientation towards the Spanish state. Following its participation in the governments of 1917 and 1919, it supported the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, participated in the right-wing governments of 1931 and 1935 and ended up giving almost unanimous support to Franco in 1936. In 1921 Acció Catalana and Estat Catala were formed, corresponding roughly to the political and military wings of radical Catalanism. [20] Both were petty bourgeois/middle class in composition and programme, though Estat Catala had aspirations to a working class intervention. In 1931 they fused with a number of other radical Catalan groups to form the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia). The Esquerra was never able to establish an organic link with the working class but it could count on the tacit support of the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc (Catalan Federation), the forerunner of the POUM, and, most importantly, the votes of the base of the abstentionist CNT. Its genuine mass base lay in the radical middle class and the poor peasantry, the rabassaires. It was with the support of these diverse strata that the Esquerra was able to sweep the board in the municipal elections of 1931 and win a 75% poll in the plebiscite for the Catalan autonomy statute in 1932.
[illegible]
It is necessary to differentiate strongly between the Esquerra and the PNV in the early years of the Second Republic. Despite the declaration of an independent Catalan Republic on April 14 1931, the Esquerra was always a Spanish republican party. Unlike the PNV it participated in the San Sebastian pact to set up the Republic and the granting of the autonomy statute in 1932 sealed its support. The PNV, on the other hand, seeking any alliance which would win autonomy, initially aligned itself with the Catholic right. It formed the Basque-Navarrese bloc of Cortes deputies with the Carlists specifically on the basis of winning such a statute. For the latter, however, the crucial issue was religious independence from the anti-clerical Madrid government. Carlist fuerismo was guided by the assumption that 'Africa begins in Madrid'. [21] The PNV, however, despite its clericalism and its continued support for the right in the Cortes, was prepared to compromise with the right wing of the PSOE and the republican government to produce a statute which decisively broke with the Integrist conceptions of Carlism. This statute, for the three provinces of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa and Alava, was approved by a plebiscite in 1933, but the arrival of a right-wing government in the same year prevented its enactment on the grounds that in Alava, a Carlist stronghold, only 46% of the poll had been in favour of the statute. The effect of this was for the PNV to align itself increasingly with the opposition parties, particularly the Esquerra.
An important turning point came with the October movement of 1934, organised by the PSOE/UGT dominated Alianza Obrera against the entry of the crypto fascist CEDA into the government. The only success of the rising campaign came in Asturias, where the miners battled for weeks against the army before finally succumbing to brutal repression. The Esquerra, too, supported the rising and once more declared an independent Republic. But the abstention of the CNT doomed the rising in Catalonia to failure. The attitude of the PNV is less clear. The POUMist Arenillas claims that the PNV did support the October movement on the basis that the PSOE would grant the autonomy statute in return. [22] Ortzi, on the other hand, quotes a PNV statement of October 4 calling for abstention. [23] What is clear is that the STV (formerly the SOV) did participate and that the strike was 100% solid, though completely passive, in Euskadi. It is also clear that, after the defeat of Asturias, repression was directed not just at the STV and the Alianza Obrera, but at the PNV as well. The PNV took this opportunity to step up its attacks on the left and to dissociate itself from any subversive intentions.
The PNV, still not satisfied that the left would agree to the statute, did not join the Popular Front which came to power in 1936. It was only when the Cortes finally agreed to the implementation of the statute (enacted in October 1936) that the links between the PNV and the Popular Front grew closer. But this did not guarantee the automatic support of the PNV for the Republic when the army rose up in July. In Navarra the PNV attempted to maintain a neutral position, while in Alava the bulk of the party and the radical separatist mendigoizales went over to the fascist camp, enlisting in the Carlist Requeté. In Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa, the PNV stronghold, the ultimate support of the Basque nationalists for the Republic was not in doubt, since this was Republican held territory. Yet for a crucial few weeks the PNV refused to participate in the Popular Front committees which governed the provinces. It is unclear to what extent dual power existed in Euskadi in the summer of 1936, [24] but it is certain that the PNV played no part in the struggle until the formation of the Juntas de Defensa which supplanted the Popular Front committees, guaranteeing the maintenance of private property, an end to popular justice and the establishment of a militia system in which the PNV had overwhelming preponderance. For the sake of PNV support, the Popular Front parties were only too ready to accede to this reduction in their own power.
It is not possible here to analyse the regime which was initiated by the formation of the Provisional Government of the autonomous Basque Republic in October 1936. A few observations must suffice. The government, headed by PNV leader Aguirre, was dominated by the PNV, with junior posts held by representatives of the Popular Front organisations chosen by Aguirre rather than their own parties. The attitude of the central government was ambivalent since it mistrusted the intentions of the PNV (rightly as it turned out), but the 'tolerant' Basque Catholic Republic was the showcase of Republican Spain, intended to entice France and Britain into breaking with non-intervention. Moves towards collectivisation were immediately reversed and confiscations from Franco supporters returned. Trade was completely free, with free export of capital and all losses guaranteed by the government at a nominal premium. Military equipment, on the other hand, was carefully channelled into the PNV battalions. Worker participation schemes demonstrated the socially concerned, paternalistic, Christian Democratic face of the regime.
The final demonstration of the PNV's commitment to the defence even of bourgeois democracy came after the fall of Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya. For some time the Basque leaders had been attempting to negotiate a surrender which would establish Italy as the guarantor of an autonomous Euskadi within fascist Spain. Finally an agreement was arrived at by the Basque and Italian troops in which the Basques surrendered their arms and themselves at Santona, refusing to continue the fight in Asturias. The Italians, of course, reneged on this agreement and delivered the Basque troops up to Franco.
The role of the Esquerra differed considerably from that of Basque nationalism by virtue of the more radical character of the party itself and the strength of the working class upsurge. Where the PNV was able to force the Popular Front to fall in behind its demands, the Esquerra found itself tail-ending the revolutionary process. For months the de facto government of Catalonia was in the hands of the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias, and the Generalitat (Catalan government) was powerless to say otherwise. Companys, the Esquerra leader and president of the Generalitat, told the CNT-FAI leaders Garcia Oliver and Durrutti: 'If you do not wish me to remain as President ... I shall become one soldier more in the struggle against fascism'. [25] The anarchists, unfortunately, declined the offer. The Esquerra's non-committal approach paid dividends. In September the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias was dissolved and dual power ended with the agreement of those organisations theoretically committed to workers' power, the CNT and the POUM, which now entered an Esquerra dominated government. The Esquerra got crucial support from the PSUC, the nominally autonomous Catalan section of the Third International, which now controlled the Unió de Rabassaires and the UGT, the latter based almost exclusively on the petty bourgeoisie. While the strength of the workers movement was sufficient to push through a collectivisation decree, the Esquerra and the PSUC had enough weight to emasculate it. Only large industries were collectivised, the medium and petty bourgeoisie — the Esquerra base — remaining almost untouched. Decisively, the banks were not nationalised so credit was controlled entirely from the exterior, leading to a dramatic fall in the productive capacity of Catalan industry. The collective monopoly of agricultural distribution was deliberately undermined by the PSUC and Unió de Rabassaires, leading to independent distribution and speculation. [26]
However, the Esquerra's decisive turn came in May 1937. The Civil Guard, with the connivance of the Catalan government, provoked a working class upsurge which served as a pretext for the suppression of the POUM and the removal of the CNT from the central government. Ironically the Esquerra's defence of its class interests entailed an apostasy on the Catalan question. Companys' call for central government troops to put down the rising was the first reduction in Catalan autonomy. Within months the Esquerra was out of the Negrin government, which now resided in Barcelona, and the Generalitat, and with it the Esquerra, was reduced to a shadow.
The national question under Franco
The details of the Francoist oppression of the minority nations need not be recorded here, [27] except to note that the character of the repression to a great extent determined the character of the opposition. The atomisation of all workers' organisations meant that a collective opposition did not emerge for some years. When such an opposition did emerge it was not primarily concerned with national oppression. The suppression of Basque and Catalan language and culture meant that until the 1960s opposition was mainly centred in the sphere of individual action on cultural questions. Slogan painting and the displaying of the national flag were the main forms of external activity. The Catalans later mounted some more adventurous actions: singing the Catalan national hymn at a concert attended by Franco, and successfully boycotting the anti-Catalan Vanguardia newspaper. [28] The Basques managed to mount demonstrations on Aberri Eguna, the national day, from 1947, but the salient feature of both national struggles until the 1970s has been the eclipse of the traditional nationalist organisations. Christian Democratic parties, like the Social Democratic, cannot exist outside the framework of a pluralist bourgeois democracy which allows them to exercise their electoral weight. Both the PNV and the Esquerra devoted their energies to intrigues and manoeuvres in their respective governments-in-exile which bore little relation to events in the interior. The PNV evolved from a fanatical pro-Americanism ('The interests of America are those of Humanity') [29] to a European federalism after the reintegration of Spain by the imperialist powers during the Cold War. The Bayonne Pact of 1945 reaffirmed support for the autonomy statute and the 1936 programme of the Basque government. The Communist Party was specifically excluded from this, as the PNV, like the PSOE, carefully cultivated a rabid cold war anti-communism. The only further action it undertook in the interior was sporadic CIA-financed guerilla activity in 1946.
The Catalans, too, organised the Generalitat-in-exile with the National Council of Catalan Democracy acting fairly independently in the interior. But only the PSUC retained its organisational structures intact and was able to capitalise upon the simultaneous demise of the Esquerra and the CNT to embark upon building the mass organisation which it has today. Petty-bourgeois Catalanism, with a perspective which did not extend far beyond cultural activities, was nevertheless able to build a base in the University of Barcelona through the evolution of Catòlics Catalans led by Jordi Pujol. Pujol and his organisation played a central role in the middle class Catalan movement. Pujol's political education ranges from torture at the hands of Franco's police to successful ventures into Catalan banking. In 1964, for the first time, a mass Catalan demonstration was mounted in Barcelona, since when overt activity has increased. This, combined with Pujol's successful financial ventures and the emergence of legal Catalan newspapers, has assisted in the formation of a new middle class Catalan current, the Catalan Democratic Convergence. It is this organisation which is the main Catalanist representative in the Catalan Assembly formed by the PSUC in 1971 as an embryo Popular Front. The CDC differs from the Catalan nationalism of the 1930s in its specifically Christian Democratic content, yet it still remains to the left of the PNV in its readiness to enter into a front with the workers parties. But at the same time it, and the Catalan Assembly, are tied to the perspective of the 30s — autonomy rather than self-determination.
Another current has re-emerged which has to be situated in the Catalanist context, although it plays no part in the Assembly. This is the regenerationism of the big Catalan bourgeoisie. It even seems possible that the Lliga or some equivalent will be revived. This development began at the end of the immediate post-war boom when the index of Catalan cotton exports (85% of Spain's total cotton cloth production) dropped from 100 in the period 1946-50 to 31.1 in 1951-55. In 1955 Catalan industrialists met in Gerona to formulate a programme of demands including import controls, free export and subsidies for Catalan industry. The only concession they won from Franco was his admission that 'Catalonia is an important factor in Spain's greatness.' [30] The continued discrimination against Catalan industry and the pressure of a growing mass Catalan movement led to the formation by the big bourgeoisie of Omnium Cultural, an umbrella organisation which sponsored a vigorous Catalan language campaign, leading to its closure. In the late 1960s there emerged a 'Barcelona School' of economists which analysed the conversion of a 20,000 million peseta Catalan trade surplus into a balance of payments deficit by the Madrid government and criticised the reduction in infrastructure spending. [31] Thus in recent years there has been cultivated a 'Catalanismo domesticado' which fits happily into the regime's liberalisation project.
Euskadi ta Askatasuna [32]
The principal differential factor between contemporary Basque and Catalan nationalism is clearly ETA. Whereas in Catalonia a reconstituted Christian Democratic movement is gaining ground with the loyal support of the Stalinists, in Euskadi the traditional Christian Democratic party remains marginal, at least until legalisation. One central reason for this is that the layers traditionally hegemonised by the PNV have now transferred their allegiance to ETA.
The formation of ETA in 1959 coincided with the period of the Stabilisation Plan. Non-monopoly industry was hard hit by the increased role of finance capital and foreign investment, a crisis which was accentuated by the government's anti-inflationary measures, particularly credit restrictions and increased interest rates, [33] Those industries which were more closely tied to the monopolies, for example in metallurgy, were generally rendered completely dependent upon them or absorbed by them. These developments had a very direct effect in radicalising a new layer of the industrial bourgeoisie. But even more importantly, the economic turn by the regime brought a further growth in the state and monopoly bureaucracies, qualitatively as important as that of 1900-1930, from which the Basque administrative layers were systematically excluded. It was from these strata that the early membership of ETA was drawn. The Basque countryside had experienced a process of re-ruralisation since 1939, with many industrial workers returning to the fields. From the late 1950's this trend was reversed. This re-proletarianisation was facilitated by the severe credit problems of the small peasantry and the rapid monopolisation of the processing industries.
It would be mistaken to draw too mechanical a relation between these developments and the evolution of ETA. The internalised accounts of Ortzi and Txabi tend to ignore the fact that until the late 1960s the organisation could not be said to be actively representative of any social stratum. Nevertheless it remains a useful generalisation to say that the political development of ETA should be seen primarily as an expression of this process of displacement within the bourgeoisie and proletarianisation within the intermediate strata.
ETA was formed out of the Ekin (Action) faction within the PNV. The original name is a good indication of the basis on which the split took place. Apart from the issue of religion, where ETA defined itself as aconfessional, the principal difference with the PNV was over the latter's passivity and pacifism. With the example of Cuba and the all-pervading state violence before them, the early ETA leaders based their organisation on the need for patriotic violence against the principal manifestations of the Spanish state in Euskadi. The early actions mounted by ETA were almost uniformly unsuccessful and invited massive police repression. Ortzi suggests that the mere fact of ETA's existence was an important spur to mass resistance. In fact, that mass action was centred entirely on the organised working class for whom ETA was, at best, an irrelevance. The new organisation soon found a theorist in Federico Krutwig, who developed an uneasy synthesis between third-worldist guerilla theory and the radical Sabinian nationalism of the 1920s and '30s. Equally importantly, José Echevarrieta further developed Mao's identification between national liberation and social liberation. By the Third Assembly in 1964, ETA had a more or less coherent body of theory defining it as an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist organisation, in contradistinction to the bourgeois PNV, and had adopted Krutwig's theory of the revolutionary war and the identification of national and social liberation. The role of ETA within this strategy was nevertheless as a catalyst rather than a mass organisation. Also established at the Third Assembly was a parallel sympathisers organisation (OPA), whose main purpose was fund-raising. Workers were exhorted to join this rather than ETA. But despite these theoretical positions, the leadership which supported them remained largely in the exterior.
The interior leadership increasingly devolved upon a tendency which closely aligned itself to ESBA, the Basque section of the 'New Left' Popular Liberation Front (FLP). The 'felipes' argued for a mass orientation, and, along with the PCE, favoured participation in the sindicato elections which was anathema to the ETA old guard. ETA's intervention was increasingly centred on the Workers Commissions, particularly the Guipuzcoa Provincial Workers Commission (COPG) which was won to a position of support for the right of self determination. Two tendencies evolved in opposition to the interior leadership. One was grouped around Krutwig on the basis of Third World 'revolutionary nationalism', the other led by Txillardegui, with a position of anti-Marxist culturalism. These tendencies allied at the Fifth Assembly (1967) to expel the leadership for its 'espanolista liquidationism.' This latter group called itself ETA-berri (subsequently Komunistak, and then MCE. It is now known as the Movimiento Comunista). It was the left tendency which dominated the remainder of the Assembly, with the culturalists subsequently splitting from the organisation.
The Fifth Assembly attempted to formulate a 'Basque revolutionary theory'. The central concept was 'el Pueblo Trabajador Vasco' (Basque working people). This was defined as all those who suffered the double oppression of nationality and exploitation at the point of production. ETA saw its function as a structured nucleus which could synthesise the unformulated aspirations of the Basque working people into a 'national class consciousness' which would overcome the false duality of national liberation/social liberation. But more importantly, Krutwig borrowed from Truong Chinh the concept of the struggle on four fronts — political, economic, cultural and military — which initiated, for the first time, a structure which was capable of projecting guerrilla activity. Yet within these developments the contradictions of the organisation's class origins were becoming manifest. The Fifth Assembly represented a turn away from the socialist positions — albeit crudely formulated — of the former interior leadership. The prime enemy was still seen as the principal visible manifestations of the Spanish state — its repressive apparatus — rather than the Spanish bourgeoisie. Hence the instrumental role of the working class in resolving the question of national oppression was rejected, and with it the need for a revolutionary party to crystallise that movement. It was more the elemental upsurge of the Basque working class in the late 1960s than ETA's actions themselves which brought about the spectacular gains made by the organisation.
The first period of successful guerilla activity, from 1967 to 1968, culminating in the execution of the police chief Manzanas in Irun, coincided with a period of intense activity by the working class (see below). It was principally for this reason that there was a mass response to the threats of death sentences on ETA militants in 1969 and at Burgos in 1970. If this was the apparent zenith of ETA's success, the period in which its stated role as catalyst of the mass movement appeared to be verified, nevertheless the mass upsurge had very direct effects on the organisation itself. José Echevarrieta initiated a workers front and the direction of the interior leadership again began to diverge from that of the 'milis' in the exterior. After the collapse of the COPG, the intervention was centred on the Comités de Empresa. These bodies took an abstentionist line in the sindicatos, and succeeded in outflanking the PCE, which was forced to join them.
This development became accentuated as arrests in 1969-70 depleted the leadership, which fell increasingly into the hands of Workers Front militants. 'La Carta a los Makos' in May 1970 crystallised the new orientation, arguing for the need to build the proletarian party across national lines, but still identifying the interests of the abertzale (patriotic) bourgeoisie with those of the proletariat. Hence the need to construct a National Front across class lines. Again this encountered two opposition tendencies, one composed of a network of Marxist discussion groups in the exterior — the Células Rojas — the other comprising the old Krutwig tendency, also in the exterior. At the Sixth Assembly that year, the interior leadership and the Células Rojas united to expel the old Fifth Assembly leadership: '...... for plotting and factional activity, putting the organisation in danger and holding petty bourgeois and liquidationist... positions which run counter to the interests of the working class and the Basque liberation struggle.' [34]
The Células Rojas in their turn split from the Sixth Assembly, criticising (with justification) the petty bourgeois policy of the National Front.
ETA-V had a new embarrassment awaiting them when, during the Burgos trials, a group of leading ETA militants in Burgos prison produced a manifesto supporting ETA-VI. It argued for a class struggle orientation on the basis of solidarity with the peoples of the Spanish state, and the building of an anti-monopoly alliance against the Spanish oligarchy. Ironically though, it is ETA-V which has adopted these positions as its basic political programme, while still maintaining the need for guerrilla activity. The evolution of ETA-VI was away from the national front/anti-monopoly alliance, towards a break with class collaborationism and an understanding of the need to build the proletarian party on the level of the state. This was consummated by the victory of the Trotskyist tendency within the organisation and its fusion with the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria in 1973. The following quotation from the LCR/ETA-VI programme serves to demonstrate the distance which the ETA majority has travelled from petty bourgeois nationalism: 'On the one hand (the existence of national minorities) has contributed to the radicalisation of the masses against reactionary, centralist state power. But on the other hand, it has been used by the peripheral nationalist bourgeoisies to conceal, in the name of ''national solidarity'', its character as an exploiting class, and to divide the working class in the name of nationalist ideology.' [35]
ETA and the workers' movement
A final question of central importance needs to be resolved in any discussion of the role of the national movements. Why are Euskadi and Catalonia in the forefront of the struggle against the Spanish state? Here it is necessary to depart from the conventional wisdom, strongly influenced by the nationalist organisations. The vanguard role of the Basque and Catalan proletariat is not primarily the product of national oppression or the national movement but of the more advanced productive relations and levels of organisation of the working class in those nations.
In Catalonia, until 1964, the only form of collective opposition was that of the organised working class. Throughout the 1950s there was a series of general strikes. These were either economic in character, like the transport boycotts of 1951 and 1956, or solidarity actions such as the 1958 strike. Significantly the PSUC could mobilise no support for political general strikes in 1958 and 1959. The crucial turning point was not 1964 when Catalanism began to re-emerge as a mass phenomenon, but 1962 with the organisation of the first Workers Commissions.
The Basque working class was, and is, more advanced in its level of activity and political consciousness than the Catalan. Here again the explanation is primarily concerned with the internal evolution of the workers' organisations themselves. The smashing of the CNT, an organisation which was ideologically adjusted to work in small manufacturing industry, and the growing hegemony of the PSUC has entailed the relative weakening of the Catalan working class. Linked to the rise of the PSUC is the fact that, contrary to popular mythology, traditional Catalanism, which has re-emerged as a stronger force than the PNV, has played its part in dampening working class activity. The threat of the working class being won behind such an anti-proletarian political perspective is growing in Catalonia.
Euskadi also saw a continuous wave of mass strikes, beginning with the seven day general strike in May 1947. It is worth bearing in mind that all the solidarity strikes in Catalonia during this period were initiated in Euskadi (with the exception of the 1958 and 1962 Asturias strikes). Not even ETA was instrumental in the development of these struggles. For example, the adoption of the boycott tactic in syndical elections in Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa, which ETA claims as a victory for its positions, was in fact initiated in the early 1970s from the example of the young Navarrese proletariat, and in particular from the lessons of the 1971 Eaton Ibérica strike in Pamplona. Similarly the Vitoria general strike earlier this year, which embodied qualitatively higher forms of struggle than any seen since the 1930s, was organised outside the aegis of the nationalist organisations, primarily by the ORT, an organisation with its roots in the Navarrese working class.
In 1965 an ETA leader was captured carrying out an armed action. ETA organised two 'mass' demonstrations to demand his release — of sixty and 150 people! The following year, after the triumph of the Workers Commission candidates in the syndical elections, genuinely mass demonstrations supported the Laminación de Bandas strike in Basauri, the biggest strike in an individual factory since the Civil War. The factory was occupied, leading to confrontations with the police. In March 1967 a mass Workers Commission meeting was broken up by the Civil Guard and a State of Exception declared. It was in this context that ETA was able to mount the successful defence of its comrades in the Burgos trials.
Burgos clearly represented a watershed. It was a spectacular demonstration of the politicisation of the workers movement in the Spanish state as a whole, on a par with May 1968 in France. But the fact that the occasion for this demonstration was solidarity with ETA members should not be taken as an indication that it was ETA which caused that radicalisation. This bald statement of the primacy of factors internal to the workers movement does admit some qualification. It is true that national oppression in Euskadi did converge with economic struggles to contribute towards the politicisation of the workers movement. The effect of this can be seen by the fact that the strikes of December 1974 and March 1976 clearly raised the demand for self-determination. But the relation of ETA (and still less the PNV) to these phenomena was only in limited cases a causal one. It is far more useful to see the evolution of ETA as another expression of the same developments. As I indicated earlier, its trajectory away from traditional nationalism towards revolutionary positions should be seen as a manifestation of the growing contradictions of a re-industrialising and proletarianising Basque society. However it had in common with traditional nationalism its lack of any sustained organic link with the workers movement. A revolutionary party, with such an organic link, has a reciprocal relation to these basic contradictions: it is both a product of them and the seed of their resolution. ETA was not, and is not, such an organisation.
3. The National Question and the Class Struggle in Spain
Nationalist organisations and the class struggle
The traditional organisations of Basque nationalism, the PNV and the Government-in-exile (PNV, PSOE, STV, UGT, CNT) are as isolated as ever from the realities of the struggle in the interior. The PSOE has always been the major farce in the Basque workers movement, but this does not mean that the Basque working class is integrated into the aspirations of bourgeois nationalism. The attempts of the PC de Euskadi to set up a Democratic Assembly of Euskadi along the lines of the Catalan Assembly have been frustrated by the traditional desire of the PNV to distance itself from 'communism'. The PNV even baulks at the idea of a 'democratic rupture' by a section of the bourgeoisie since this suggests violence. [36] More accurately, a 'rupture' might present a threat to the interests of small Basque capital. [37] Hence the PNV situates its perspective entirely within the framework of Spanish — and European — Christian Democracy.
However, the apparent irrelevance of the PNV does not preclude its resurgence on a future electoral terrain. While it is clear that ETA-V now hegemonises the non-proletarian strata which once formed the base of the PNV, in an election the PNV could hope to pick up the ETA vote in the way that the Esquerra was carried to power on the CNT vote in the 1930s. But ETA-V itself bears increasingly less relation to the crucial — that is, working class — struggles. It is no coincidence that ETA-V has become more isolated and inactive since Franco's death opened up a new phase of mass struggles. Its politics are still predicated upon a number of assumptions whose bankruptcy is becoming increasingly apparent. The basic assumption is of the popular-national and anti-monopoly character of the Basque revolution. In other words, stagism is used to justify the formation of a National Front across class lines. All attempts to construct this, including the latest, the Popular Assembly of Euskadi, have failed, but it still remains as theoretical justification for building a guerrilla organisation rather than a proletarian party.
In Catalonia on the other hand, the picture is increasingly one of cohesion between all anti-Francoist forces, grouped in the Catalan Assembly and the Council of Political Forces. The leading Catalan nationalist organisation, Pujol's CDC, is exclusively a party of the medium and petty bourgeoisie. However, as always, the cement in the alliance is the PSUC. The participation of the PSUC and the Workers Commissions in the Assembly means that the Catalan working class finds itself organisationally tied to nationalism. Whereas the Basque workers movement has been increasingly characterised by its readiness to break with nationalist perspectives and assert its organisational independence, in Catalonia the movement seems to be away from the independent class mobilisations of the 1950s and '60s to actions which accommodate to the lowest common denominator of their bourgeois 'allies'. It is not accidental that two massive demonstrations in Barcelona this February, whilst overwhelmingly proletarian in composition, were nevertheless Catalanist in political content. This is not, of course, to write off the Catalan working class as an independent political force, but to recognise inevitable effects on proletarian organisation in an area where the Popular Front is most developed.
For Maurin, a leader of the centrist POUM, 'the national movement is beginning to move from the field of the petty-bourgeoisie to that of the working class.' [38] This could be taken as a text for most of the Spanish left. To the POUM this meant both a negation of the necessity to fight for working class leadership of the national struggle, and support for the Catalan autonomy statute. Indeed, the Spanish left, where it has not been in outright opposition to the national struggle, has tended to assume that it had an automatically progressive character. It shares this assumption with ETA-V and with many Catalan nationalists. One Catalan writer argues that the bourgeois revolution in Spain was consummated in 1837. Since then any movement against the Spanish state must automatically be of a 'popular' and 'progressive' complexion. [39] At a stroke, the role of the Lliga is written out of history. The PSOE has passed from virulent centralism, through support for the Basque autonomy statute to the position of putting the right to self-determination into the programme of the Plataforma. Even the anarcho-syndicalists evolved from Bakunin's judgement on the national question — 'a movement which is backward, disastrous and counter-revolutionary' — to a resolution to 'defend the autonomist claims of the Iberian peoples, protect the autonomy statutes and struggle against centralism'. [40] All these positions manifest the characteristics discussed at the beginning of this article: a failure to distinguish the political demand for self-determination from nationalist ideology, leading to a capitulation to autonomism. This tendency is most marked in the politics of the Communist parties. The PCE made its turn towards the national question in 1935, primarily because the non-monopoly bourgeoisies of Euskadi and Catalonia, particularly the latter, would be exceptionally receptive to the new Popular Front tactic. Hence the decision to set up the nominally autonomous PSUC and PC de Euskadi. José Diaz, the general secretary of the PCE announced his desire to recognise 'the right of Catalonia, Euskadi, Galicia and such nationalities as are oppressed by Spanish imperialism the right freely to decide their own destinies'. This was not realised in practice. In fact Negrin was probably acting on PCE orders when he cracked down on Catalan autonomy in 1937. [41] In 1945 the PCE hit upon a far happier formulation which has survived in the programme of the Junta Democratica: 'recognition of the national personality of the peoples of Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia.' [42]
It is this return to a psychological style of definition which creates a suitable vagueness to cover up for the failure to recognise the right to self-determination. [43] A recent article by PCE leader Santiago Alvarez attempts to theorise this. Here we find that the recognition of the 'personalities' of the minority nations is meant to accommodate both the autonomist sentiment and to those allies of the PCE (the 'progressive' bourgeoisie) who will not break with the unitary Spanish state: 'In today's conditions (the unity of the state)...is also an unavoidable political necessity (emphasis in original) because without the support of those forces which are especially sensitive to this unity, it is impossible either to win liberty or to consolidate this state' (my emphasis). [44] or further: 'Our proletariat is already very conscious that under capitalism belonging to a large state offers greater possibilities of struggle against capital than being a part of small states...But these advantages, emphasised in their time by the great teachers and later by Lenin, do not end with the rule of capitalism as a social system. They anticipate a future socialist perspective. (emphasis in original). [45] The proletariat is at an advantage when the capitalist state is strong and centralised? Poor old Lenin was completely wrong on the question of the voluntary integration of states! There is not even the barest pretension of recognition of the right to self-determination. Instead we have a return to Austro-Marxism and cultural-national autonomy. However, it is perhaps too kind to read even this semblance of theoretical coherence into the positions of the PCE.
Underlying the entire perspective of 'national personalities' is the fact that the non-monopoly bourgeoisies of the minority nationalities still offer the best prospects for the formation of a Popular Front.
Towards a revolutionary [illegible] for the national struggle
The reformist perspective on the national question in its various forms is characterised simultaneously by a capitulation to the ideology of nationalism and the practical denial of the right to self-determination. A revolutionary position must embody precisely the opposite: resolute opposition to nationalism combined with equally vigorous support for the right to self-determination. However, in order to concretise such a position it is necessary to dispel one of the fondest illusions of the Trotskyist movement with regard to Spain: namely that the task of revolutionaries is the realisation of the theory of Permanent Revolution.
Of course there is a sense in which the theory applies to Spain: it is not possible for socialism to be realised within its national boundaries. But it is incorrect to say that the role of the Spanish revolution is the realisation of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This aspect of permanent revolution relates exclusively to colonial and semi-colonial countries. In these countries the proletariat is both numerically and qualitatively in a subordinate position and the burning tasks are those of the bourgeois-democratic revolution: the agrarian question, the national question and so on. There is an extent to which these problems have to be resolved within the Spanish revolution but the crucial difference is the overwhelming predominance of capitalist productive relations which places the socialist tasks of the revolution on the immediate agenda. Neither is it true to say that the Spanish bourgeoisie is historically incapable of resolving the outstanding tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. For a whole period that bourgeoisie has adopted a form of government which has rendered unnecessary, indeed is itself structurally incapable of, the resolution of the national question (though it has significantly capitalised agrarian productive relations). This is the preferred political solution [illegible] situation, when its class rule was at stake, it could acquiesce in the secession of the minority nationalities. From this we conclude that the tasks of revolutionaries in Euskadi and Catalonia are decisively different from those in colonial and semi-colonial countries. They must be situated within the framework, not of winning proletarian hegemony over those layers (primarily the peasantry) struggling for democratic demands, but of unifying the proletarian programme of demands flowing from the principal class contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Trotsky's remarks in the section of the Transitional Programme concerned with fascist countries are worth noting in this context. After stressing the importance of democratic demands in mobilising the masses He comments that: '...the formulas of democracy...mean for us only incidental or episodic slogans in the independent movement of the proletariat and not a democratic noose fastened to the neck of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie's agents. (Spain!)' [46] Algebraically, revolutionaries approach the national question along the dual axis of support for the right to self-determination and the fiercest struggle against the ideology of nationalism. The specific application of this orientation, the admixture of these two elements appropriate to a concrete intervention, are determined by a 'precise appraisal of the specific historical situation'. While it is correct to support the demand for separatism within an Iberian bourgeois democracy [illegible] Socialist Federation, the prime task of revolutionaries in Euskadi and Catalonia is the fight against nationalism on the basis of an integral programme of demands for the overthrow of capitalism.
Although the proletariat is overwhelmingly predominant among the oppressed layers in Euskadi and Catalonia, and has played a de facto leadership role in the struggle for self determination, the dangers of it being integrated into a Popular Frontist perspective for the preservation of the bourgeois state are actually greater than in the rest of the Spanish state. This is because the bourgeoisies of Euskadi and Catalonia do still, to a greater or lesser extent, distance themselves from the positions of the Spanish bourgeoisie. Hence their capacity to restore political hegemony over the proletariat, through the ministrations of the Stalinist and reformist parties, is proportionately greater. Such a possibility is already being realised through the Catalan Assembly and will become even greater if, as seems likely, some form of autonomy statute, however miserable, is granted.
For these reasons the utmost clarity is required of Basque and Catalan revolutionaries on the question of the Popular Front. Tariq Ali's position that 'the Popular Fronts of the Thirties were pledged essentially to combat fascism together with important sections of the bourgeoisie' [47] is simply not adequate. The main characteristic of the Spanish Popular Front of the 1930s was that no significant section of the bourgeoisie participated. There was only what Trotsky called the 'shadow of the bourgeoisie'. The essence of the Popular Front is not specifically concerned with fascism but with the defence or conquest of bourgeois democracy. It is most usefully seen as a tactic flowing from the stagist conceptions of Stalinism rather than a tactic utilised by the bourgeoisie (though it may be that too).
The Popular Front is defined by two criteria, each of which, in itself, is sufficient. The first is the programmatic formulation of demands, not just for the content of concrete intervention, but for the retention or establishment of the specific institutions in which that democracy is held to be embodied, with the declared aim of winning an alliance with the bourgeoisie. The second is the actual participation of the bourgeoisie in a front with workers organisations. The former negates the possibility of a proletarian United Front, the latter consummates the destruction of the organisational independence of the working class. Thus we can define the Pacto por la Libertad, the Junta Democratica, the Plataforma de Convergencia Democratica and the Coordinadora Democratica as all Popular Frontist on a programmatic basis even though none has actually succeeded in winning a significant section of the bourgeoisie to its platform. In the case of Catalonia and Euskadi we can be equally categorical. The LCR/ETA-VI refuses to participate in the Catalan Assembly on the basis that it both has a bourgeois programme and includes bourgeois parties. The same can be said with equal certainty of any 'national front' or 'democratic assembly' which ETA-V or the PCE might set up in Euskadi, as it can be said of the present Basque government-in-exile.
It is generally considered that, in Spanish politics, issues are resolved at the centre and the peripheral regions fall into line behind this resolution. This was certainly the case in the 1930s when the Catalan working class, the most politically advanced in the Spanish state, was unable decisively to affect the course of events. In the 1970s, however, the reverse may well be true. For revolutionaries Catalonia and Euskadi (the latter in particular) are crucial because they contain, at the same time, the most advanced sections of the proletariat and the fractions of the bourgeoisie most capable of sinking the Spanish revolution on the rocks of Popular Frontism. Perhaps the greatest danger is that the national question will be the democratic noose fastened to the neck of the Spanish proletariat.
FOOTNOTES
1. Trotsky, Stalin (Panther edition), vol.1, p233; vol.2, p168.
2. Cf. for example Robert Dorn, Irish nationalism and British imperialism, p3 and pp32-33.
3. Cf. Michel Lowy, 'Le Probleme de l'histoire' in Les Marxistes et la question nationale (Paris, 1974), pp386-88 for such a critique.
4. Cf. for example his remarks on the Germans in the Russian Empire.
5. Ortzi, Historia de Euskadi: el nacionalismo vasco y ETA (Paris, 1975), p142.
6. Josep Termes, 'Interpretacion del nacionalismo catalan', (Cuadernos de Ruedo Iberico 48-49), p57.
7. Alan Freeman, 'The Nation in the Transitional Epoch', in International, vol.3, no.1, p44.
8. Ibid, p45.
9. Ibid, p45.
10. Albert Balcells, Cataluna Contemporanea II 1900-1936 (Madrid, 1974), Ch.1.
11. Ibid, Ch.3.
12. Norman L. Jones, 'The Catalan Question since the Civil War', in Spain in Crisis (London, 1976), p238.
13. Cf. José Maria Arenillas, The Basque Country — the National Question and the Socialist Revolution (1937), pp7-8.
14. Ortzi, op. cit., p123.
15. Ibid, p133.
16. Martin Blinkhorn, Carlism and Crisis in Spain 1931-1939 (Cambridge, 1975), pp13 and 17. Cf. also Isidre Molas, El sistema [illegible] Cataluna 1931-36.
17. Ortzi, op. cit., p140.
18. Balcells op. cit. Ch.2.
19. Cf. Ronald Fraser's report from Spain in NLR 97.
20. Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Revolution (London, 1970), p114.
21. José Antonio Aguirre, Entre la libertad y la revolucion (Bilbao, 1936), p108.
22. Arenillas, op. cit., p11.
23. Ortzi, op. cit., p200.
24. Cf. Arenillas and Ortzi for the opposing views.
25. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Pelican, 1965), p210.
26. Balcells, op. cit., Ch.5.
27. Cf. Kenneth Medhurst, The Basques (Minority Rights Group, 1972) for details.
28. Joan Roig, 'Veinticinco anos de movimiento nacional en Cataluna', in Horizonte Espanol, 1966 II (Paris), pp123 and 127.
29. Aguirre, De Guernica a Nueva York..., p376.
30. Roig, op. cit., p120.
31. Jones, op. cit., p259.
32. It is impossible to do justice to this subject in so short a space. Interested readers are referred to Chapter 6 of Ortzi, op. cit., and to Txabi, 'ETA y la cuestion nacional vasca', in Horizonte Espanol, 1972 II, on which this section is based.
33. Cf. Ortzi, op. cit., pp285-89.
34. Txabi, op. cit., p85.
35. LCR/ETA-VI, Un programa de combate, p30.
36. Statement by PNV president Ajuriaguerra.
37. Cf. Fraser's report from Spain in NLR 97.
38. Ortzi, op. cit., p205.
39. Termes, op. cit., pp44-45.
40. Paris Congress of the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE), quoted by Jones, op. cit., p246 (my emphasis).
41. Ortzi, op. cit., p205.
42. Guy [illegible], Les communistes en Espagne (Paris, 1971), p54 (my emphasis).
43. The original Point 9 of the Junta programme read: 'The recognition, within the unity of the Spanish state, of the personality of the Catalan, Basque and Galician peoples and the regional communities which so decide democratically.'
44. Santiago Alvarez, 'El problema nacional en Espana...' (Nuestra Bandera 76, Sept-Oct 1974), p19.
45. Ibid, p20.
46. Trotsky, The Transitional Programme (Pathfinder edition), p101.
47. Tariq Ali, Chile — Lessons of the Coup (IMG), p3.