Antentas’ An October in Catalonia covers the 2017 independence referendum there, but leaves many questions unanswered, finds Chris Bambery

As I was finishing this book, news came that the Spanish Supreme Court had decided to maintain the arrest warrant against Carles Puigdemont, the exiled President of Catalonia, for misuse of public funds in regard to the 1 October 2017 independence referendum, the focus of Josep Maria Antentas’s An October in Catalonia. This means Puigdemont is not covered by the 2018 Amnesty Law which released nine jailed Catalan leaders; this was finally ratified in May this year, to the fury of Spain’s right wing.

The decision was justified on the basis that if the pro-independence leaders had not paid for ‘the promotion of the referendum’ with public money, they would have done so ‘out of their own pockets’. Therefore, Spanish constitutional law professor Joaquín Urías explained, ‘from this invented presumption it follows that they saved money, and therefore they have become richer.’

This personal ‘enrichment’ was thus used by the judges to exclude the misuse of funds offences from being covered by the amnesty law, even though none of the pro-independence leaders pocketed a single euro.

This is not a legal decision – there is no evidence to support it – it is a political one made by a Spanish judiciary, many of whom are political appointees, who have become highly politicised and act accordingly, particularly regarding Catalonia, but also on wider issues. Four members of the Catalan government in 2017 who were freed by the amnesty remain barred from standing for public office because of this charge.

Puigdemont fled into exile in Belgium following the 1 October referendum and the eventual declaration of independence by the Catalan parliament on 27 October. That was immediately followed by Spain annulling the Catalan Statute of Autonomy, imposing direct rule, and issuing arrest warrants for political and civic leaders.

The 1 October referendum, and the build up to it, saw the Spanish state use repression in an attempt to stop voting. Paramilitary riot police attacked voters, smashing their way into polling stations to seize ballot papers and boxes in scenes not seen in Western Europe for decades. It is widely believed a phone call at noon from the European Commission to the right-wing Popular Party government in Madrid stopped the police operation.

The movement and the leadership

The fact the referendum went ahead was because of a grassroots movement which defended the ballot stations using non-violent direct action and then organised a general strike (in many ways more like a South African stay away) in response to the actions of the Spanish state. But the repression continued with thousands arrested for tearing up pictures of King Felipe, flying Catalan flags from municipal buildings on the day of a Spanish national holiday, or in one case a clown for standing silently beside a Civil Guard during a police raid.

One of the central problems addressed by Antentas was that the referendum did go ahead and produced a Yes vote for independence but for three weeks after that nothing happened. The grassroots movement had scored a success, but it was relying on the pro-independence coalition government to deliver, which had no strategy to do so.

Headed by Puigdemont, it was a coalition of his centre-right party and the centre-left Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Catalan Left Republicans, ERC) with the external support of the radical-left Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (People’s Unity Candidacy, CUP).

As George Kerevan and I wrote in our book, Catalonia Reborn (Luath Press, 2018), the three the politicians dithered for three weeks, which allowed the grassroots movement to whither. When the independence vote took place on 27 October, the Catalan politicians went home for the weekend, the Spanish state did not.

Antentas addresses this but places it within a wider strategic failure of the independence movement to build into largely Spanish-speaking working-class areas with the message that independence would bring a break with austerity and neoliberalism. That never happened. The message from both powerful civic organisations, most importantly the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (Catalan National Assembly, ANC), and from the Catalan political parties was ‘we need our own state’, without spelling out what form that state would take and what its social and political agenda was.

I recall travelling from the airport into Barcelona in 2017 and remarking to my companions that the number of Catalan flags displayed from apartments grew from almost none at the beginning to so many in the city centre; in other words, there were few in largely Spanish speaking working-class estates and many in the prosperous centre.

That was a massive political failing which has still not been addressed. The CUP did establish important footholds in the post-industrial ex-red belt round Barcelona. In Badalona it contributed to the defeat of the racist PP mayor Albiol by building a coalition of forces with the independent, but CUP sympathiser, Dolors Sabater as mayor.

But overall, it too, relied on the Catalan government delivering the final independence decision. Antentas discusses the CUP but never gives a description of it. From my understanding, it contains those who see independence as the priority, autonomist currents and those who locate themselves in a more Leninist tradition.

Antentas makes some good points; the CUP and the wider independence movement needs to look for alliances with the left in Spain and beyond (not easy given the appalling position of the Spanish left on the national question). He also notes at one point, the CUP’srefusal to work inside the mass membership ANC. Each 11 September, Catalonia’s national day, the ANC organises hundreds of thousands on the streets of Barcelona in support of independence but each year the CUP organises a separate march, which I have always found strange.

Comparisons and legacies

At no point does Antentas mention the independence movement in Scotland, despite the close connections which developed between it and its Catalan equivalent. There are similarities and differences between the two, but both are what is usually called ‘civic nationalism’ not ‘blood and soil’ nationalism (that has now, unfortunately, emerged in Catalonia).

The big difference was that, in Scotland in 2014, the working class overwhelmingly voted Yes. That was because after a dreadful start in which Scottish National Party leaders kept insisting nothing would really change with independence, a number of groups, notably the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC), started campaigning in working-class areas, which had not seen a politician for years, with a radical economic, social and anti-imperialist message. The RIC also consciously made the effort to link to left-wing nationalist organisations in Euskadi, Quebec and Catalonia, particularly the CUP.

But there are two problems I found with An October in Catalonia. The first is that in the first chapter, he asserts that the Spanish state is based on the shoddy compromise, the Transition, made in the wake of General Francisco Franco’s death in November 1975, between the majority of the fascist leadership and the leaderships of the opposition Socialist and Communist Parties. The fascist leaders realised that, as Lampedusa wrote in The Leopard, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ The underground Socialists and Communists agreed that they would retain the apparatus of the Francoist state in return for legality and formal parliamentary democracy.

The Transition included an amnesty for all of Franco’s executioners and torturers and an agreed ‘Pact of Silence’ between both sides to draw a curtain over the crimes committed by Franco during the 1936-9 Spanish Civil War and the years of dictatorship which followed. That allowed the toxic legacy of Francoism to pollute the new Spain. It also meant there was no real solution to the national question in Euskadi and Catalonia. The Socialists and Communists had once been committed to a federal Spain in which there would be the right to self-determination. Now they accepted a constitution which stressed the unity of Spain. The Bourbon monarchy, the army command and judiciary all championed that.

Catalonia, a bastion of the anti-fascist resistance, did get autonomy but it was highly circumscribed. The Spanish state worked with right-wing Catalan nationalists to successfully marginalise the left. The latter gained control of the new Catalan government and worked with successive Spanish governments to, unsuccessfully, influence decisions in Madrid, and to win greater powers for itself. Independence was not on the agenda.

The movement will return

What changed to make support for independence a majority, or near-majority position? What Antentas does not explain is that support for independence in Catalonia, as in Scotland and Wales, flows from a deep and ongoing crisis of the respective states. That takes different forms – in the case of the UK, it flows from Britain’s irreversible decline – but they create a desire to exit each state.

In Catalonia, the decisive moment came in 2010 when the Spanish Supreme Court (them again) struck down key clauses of a new Catalan statute of autonomy agreed with the Spanish government and voted for in a referendum in Catalonia. Mass protests followed and support for independence soared.

Today, given the hangover from October 2017, the Catalan independence movement is in the doldrums, but it will rise again because the crisis of the Spanish state will re-emerge. In other words, there is an objective, not just a subjective, basis to Catalan independence. This is missing from An October in Catalonia.

There is much good in this volume. His section on the Catalan language is particularly good. He also points to the emergence of the Alianza Catalana (Catalan Alliance) a fascist, pro-independence group with the usual anti-Islam, anti-migrant agenda.

This is particularly sad. In the immediate wake of October 2017, I took a British MP on a fact-finding tour of Catalonia. In Banyoles, which voted over 90% for independence, we had a meeting in the mosque with members of the town’s large Muslim population. They had all voted for independence. Almost all spoke or were learning Catalan.

The second major problem with the book is that Antentas’s first chapter is a long, theoretical one which is, unfortunately, written in a sub-Gramscian language which makes it impenetrable at times. Gramsci had to write in code to beat the prison censors, we do not.

This is a useful book but with serious flaws. That is a shame because a Marxist analysis of the Catalan question is always welcome and always needed.