CATALONIA will declare independence from Spain in a matter of days, the leader of the autonomous region said yesterday following the referendum, which savage Spanish police attacks could not stop, and which overwhelmingly decided on Catalan independence.
President Carles Puigdemont added that his government would ‘act at the end of this week or the beginning of next’ and declare independence in a matter of days. The general strike with forty trade unions taking part, and hundreds of thousands marching has proven that this movement has the massive support of the working class.
It is in fact the continuation of the Spanish socialist revolution, and a rekindling of the revolutionary movement of the Spanish working class that erupted in the 1930s and was crushed by the Spanish ruling class in the most violent fashion, aided by the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini and the non-intervention policies of France and the UK.
The response of Spain’s King Felipe VI to the Catalan movement has been to pledge a counter-revolution. He pledged intervention, saying that the vote’s organisers ‘have placed themselves totally outside the law and democracy … It is the responsibility of the legitimate state powers to ensure constitutional order,’ he added.
The Spanish High Court said it has begun an investigation into key Catalan figures on Wednesday on suspicion of sedition – inciting rebellion against the state – including the head of Catalonia’s regional police.
The working class of Spain and the workers of the world must and will give their full support to the heroic struggle of the Catalan people against the counter-revolutionary intervention of the Spanish state, and will denounce the EU leaders, and the the May government, who are supporting the Spanish state, justifying a counter-revolutionary intervention, and refusing to condemn the savage police attacks on the masses on polling day.
The essence of the situation is that the Spanish fascists ran Spain right up to Franco’s death on November 20th 1975. The Spanish working class was under the ‘Iron Heel’ of fascism for 30 years after the ending of the Second World War.
During this time, there was no bourgeois democracy, no legal trade unionism, no right to strike and socialist parties were illegal. The revolutionary overthrow of fascism was avoided by the tactic, fronted by King Juan Carlos, whom Franco had nominated as his heir, of changing and modifying the political regime, bringing in elements of bourgeois democracy, while leaving the Franco army and its state apparatus intact. They tried to put a lid on Spain.
In March 1977, the right to strike was legalised, with the right to unionise being granted the following month. Also in March, a new electoral law (Ley Electoral) was introduced as the framework for Spain’s electoral system to be brought more into line with those of other countries that were bourgeois democracies.
This structure then managed to survive a number of attempts at a fascist coup, with the state as a whole seeing no need for such a reversion. Now the working class is on the march to smash the dictatorial Spanish capitalist state and to go forward to a socialist Catalonia and a socialist Spain.
The difference between now and the 1930s is that that period was one of great defeats for the working class, particularly the coming to power of Hitler and Mussolini, while the Stalinist policy for Spain, that the working class must not take the power but must limit itself to support the Spanish bourgeois republic that was unable to fight and defeat fascism, paved the way for defeat.
Today, the capitalist crisis is driving the working class forward all over the world, to challenge capitalism. In the UK, the Brexit revolution is smashing the Tory party, while in France and Germany, the working class is battling Macron’s anti-union laws, while Germany’s youth put the recent G20 under siege.
What is required for this situation is the building of the Fourth International in every country to lead the victory of the world socialist revolution, to put an end to capitalism, so that society can go forward!
